


The Case of the Disappeared Villain

by stabbyunicorn



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Conspiracy, Gen, LGBTQ Themes, Mystery, Trans, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-09-19 18:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17006943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stabbyunicorn/pseuds/stabbyunicorn
Summary: Did Mr. Gladly hate her? A half-semester group project with Sophia and Madison, and they had to write fifteen pages on Lustrum? “Radical feminist who castrated men” didn’t quite cut it.But as Taylor, Sophia, and Madison investigate, they begin to wonder if Lustrum was really a villain at all… and someone doesn’t want them to ever learn the truth.





	1. The Group Project

**Author's Note:**

> ⚠️ Transphobia. Trans issues are rather involved in the plot of this story, and transphobia will feature. Maybe Lustrum is transphobic. Maybe someone else is. Maybe it’s just a family member of one of the leads. I won’t spoil any more.
> 
> * * *
> 
> What even is this story? I don’t know, I really don’t know. Never done a straight-up mystery before. They’re all about balance, aren’t they? Will it be too exposition-y? Too obvious? Too confusing?
> 
> ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT I GUESS Y’ALL

“You can’t, you know, bullshit it?” asked Sophia. “What are nerds even good for?”

I shot her a harsh glare that only seemed to amuse her. What did she expect from me? Magic? Madison, the other member of our cursed group, tapped her pencil idly against the sheet of notebook paper upon our shared desk, on which she had written a copy of all three relevant paragraphs any of us had managed to scrape from PHO.

Calm. I was calm. No need to murder Sophia if I was calm, right? My costume would be ready in a week or two, and then all of this would seem so petty and pointless. I’d be fighting actual crime. Maybe I could even make a difference, and forget about Sophia and Madison and this stupid “cross-functional” class of Gladly’s. Given his seeming delight in teaching it, the class had almost certainly been his idea. Still, it could be worse: Emma could be in our group, instead of one group over.

Another calming breath, along with a quick glare at Gladly for good measure—he didn’t notice—and I gathered myself for a reply to Sophia, my second-least favorite person in the world.

“These three paragraphs?” I said, pointing at the sheet of paper and interrupting Madison’s incessant tapping. “It’s all we’ve found on PHO. We have to fill _fifteen pages_. Have you ever written a fifteen page paper? Because I haven’t, and as you put it, I’m a ‘nerd.’ So no, Sophia, I can’t ‘bullshit.’ Can’t make something from nothing.”

“Clearly _you_ can’t,” said Emma from her team’s table, twisting in her chair to make a show of glancing me up and down. At least _her_ group had been assigned a well-known cape. There was plenty to be found on Miss Militia, from PHO to newspaper articles to television segments; the TV segments would be particularly useful for the presentation we’d have to give when the assignment was complete.

Our team’s topic should have been nearly as easy. Given our villain’s reputation—hadn’t _everyone_ heard of her?—I had hoped we’d find plenty. Unfortunately, we were not so lucky. Lustrum was, somehow, unknown.

“I thought you were supposed to be smart, Taylor,” Emma continued. Why did she bother with bothering me? Didn’t she have her own project to focus on? “What would your moth—”

“Emma,” said Madison, “Don’t you have your own group?”

I never thought I’d think this, but… _thanks, Madison._ I guess group projects counted for something, and in this case, the project counted for a full third of our class grades. Madison and Sophia were stuck with me, and I was stuck with them. I wasn’t sure how I’d stop myself from sending black widows after them.

Madison turned back to Sophia and I, and the small desk we were seated around. All Winslow classrooms were cramped, but this one was more so, with its chairs gathered in clusters of three or four to a desk. It was an uncomfortable arrangement, with no room beneath the desk for us to put our legs without knocking our knees against each others’. Sophia’s knees seemed particularly sharp, but at least she didn’t seem to enjoy ramming them into mine; I supposed it must hurt her, too.

Thankfully, this class hadn’t started until mid-semester. I couldn’t imagine walking in, first week back from the hospital, to find I’d been partnered with two of the very people who had put me there.

“And this is all you found?” I asked them. “Just what’s on PHO?”

I wasn’t really surprised. I’d not found much else, either. Sophia shrugged and leaned back in her chair, wincing as her knees again rammed into mine. Her hands fiddled with the eraser of a mechanical pencil. A piece of the eraser broke off. She looked down at it, nonplussed.

“I asked around on the forums,” said Madison, defensively. “But nobody said anything, except for how nobody was saying anything. So unless we want to write that it was a Simurgh plot…”

In spite of myself, I snorted.

The broken piece of eraser hit me in the face. I shot Sophia a quick glare. Another piece of eraser was already on the table. Her index finger prepared to flick it— But Madison’s hand slammed down over hers and stopped her.

“I don’t think ‘it was a Simurgh plot’ would fill fifteen pages,” I said. “And it wouldn’t make a very good presentation, either, unless we just made the whole thing a bunch of pictures of the Simurgh.”

This time Madison snorted.

“We’d have to censor it,” she said.

Sophia extricated her hand from under Madison’s. She left the eraser on the table, and began fiddling with her mechanical pencil instead.

“We could check the newspapers,” said Sophia, twisting the bit of lead jutting from the pencil’s tip. “There has to be something.”

Like I hadn’t tried that. I was a ‘nerd,’ after all, wasn’t I? I’d done a search, both with the library’s online search, and a few newspapers’ own search tools.

“Nothing,” I said. “Not in _The Brockton World_ , not in _The Paraporter_ , not in _The Boston Globe._ And if any of them _did_ have anything on her, a normal search engine should have picked it up, shouldn’t it have?”

“Really?” asked Sophia, leaning forward, suddenly interested. “Nothing?”

I shook my head, and Madison quirked her head in that annoying way she often did, with that stupid little smile.

“That’s wrong,” said Sophia.

“Wrong?” What did she mean, ‘Wrong?’ I knew how to search—

“Capes usually get lots of coverage,” she said, a little smirk of a smile that didn’t really make sense pulling at her lips. “Even the smaller ones. Shadow Stalker’s not so huge, but even she’s had at least one front-pager, and a handful of articles.”

“Really?” I asked. A moment later, I realized that Madison had asked the question with me.

“Lustrum shouldn’t be any different,” said Sophia. “She was strong. Strong enough they had to cage her. Better still, she was scandalous. They’d salivate.”

She tapped the sheet of notebook paper lying on the desk. I glanced at it, and frowned slightly at Madison’s neat handwriting with the hearts over the ‘i’s instead of dots.

“I checked,” I released. “Nothing.”

“Really,” said Sophia, more of a skeptical statement than a question. “You searched through—” she glanced down at the paper “—ten years of newspapers, all since Tuesday?”

For a long moment, I stared at her. Did she think you had to search newspapers by hand?

“Newspapers have search tools,” I said.

“So you didn’t go through one by one?” she asked.

“I’m not going to search through decades of newspapers on my own,” I said, indignant. “Not for you.”

“Articles can be pulled,” she said. “Must have been. Can’t trust digital. Should be able to tell if they pulled print copies, though. Issues will be missing.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable at the idea of such censorship. “Why would they pull issues?”

“National security,” said Sophia, simply. She leaned back in her chair again, as if self-satisfied. Madison’s eyebrows raised and her stupid little smile grew bigger, as if she were fascinated by this new development.

“And how would you know?” I asked.

“I know people,” said Sophia, blasé.

Madison and I both looked at her expectantly, but she did not elaborate, preferring instead to sit there with that infuriating, faux-effortless smirk of hers. She was bullshitting, wasn’t she?

Finally, Madison broke the silence.

“Would they know anything about Lustrum?” she asked. “These people you know? Do they work for the PRT? Do they know heroes? Could we _meet_ with heroes? I want to meet Armsmaster, or Dauntless, or Clockblocker. Or Dauntless _and_ Clockblocker.”

Calm down, Madison. And I thought _I_ was a cape geek. Sophia rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, shrugging. Yeah, she was bullshitting. “I’ll see. Should still look at the newspapers. Got to. Lustrum’s big time. If there’s nothing, something’s wrong.”

She was still leaning back in her chair, that easy, insouciant smirk as infuriating as it ever was. More infuriatingly still, she wasn’t wrong. Why _was_ there so little on Lustrum?

I made myself stop biting my lip.

“I’m _not_ reading through thousands of newspapers,” I said. Much as I might want to know why Lustrum was such an enigma, I wasn’t about to search through decades of newspapers on Sophia’s conspiratorial hunches. If they’d pulled articles—whoever ‘they’ were—why wouldn’t they just pull issues, too?

“Shouldn’t be thousands if we’re smart about it,” said Sophia. “Don’t have to do it alone, anyway.”

She was playing with the mechanical pencil again, and didn’t bother look up to catch my quizzical expression.

“With _you?_ ” I said, not quite containing a dismissive laugh.

“Sure,” she said, her voice straining to sound nonchalant. She flicked a bit of mechanical pencil lead at me, but it was so small I wouldn’t have noticed it had hit me if I hadn’t seen it.

“Really.”

“Why not?” asked Sophia. “Group project, right?”

She glanced at Madison, who shrugged. How was I supposed to respond to that? She and her friends had caused me to be hospitalized for a week, and still hadn’t let up their harassment campaign, and now she wanted to work with me?

“Fuck you.”

“I don’t fuck weaklings.”

“Is this really—” Madison tried to interject, but Emma beat her to it, once more twisting around in her chair just to needle me.

“Drama again, Taylor?” she asked. I could tell she hadn’t really been listening; her words sounded like a caricature of her normal self. “What’s got her going this time? This should be an easy project. We’ve found plenty on Miss Militia already.”

“Emma,” said Madison, slowly. “Stop. And none of us have found anything, so it’s obviously _not_ an easy project.”

Emma glanced at Sophia for backup, but Sophia, still slumped carelessly in her seat, merely raised an eyebrow.

The bell rang, and not a moment too soon. I wanted to punch someone. At least it was the last class of the day. Maybe I wouldn’t wait to finish my spider-silk costume before making my debut… Maybe I’d go out tonight. Then again, wasn’t that the sort of mistake all the starting independent capes made?

I sprung to my feet and grabbed my bag. I didn’t bother laying the strap across my shoulder: I wanted to get away from Sophia and Madison as quickly as I could. Why had Gladly put the three of us together? He couldn’t _not_ know at least _some_ of what they’d done to me. Then again, maybe he thought they’d need to let go of some of their animosity if they had to work with me, at least until the project was done. If I thought I had luck to begin with, I’d count myself lucky he hadn’t put Emma in the group. Maybe he’d realized the only thing _she’d_ ever let go was our friendship.

Still, maybe it _would_ help. Sophia hadn’t been as antagonistic, even if she’d not been nice, and Madison—

“Where do we find old newspapers?” asked Madison. How had she caught up with me? Didn’t she have her own rather heavy bag? I wasn’t sure how she managed to match my pace while also bouncing on her feet.

“Library, idiot,” said Sophia. Great. She’d caught up, too. “They have copies of newspapers. Don’t they?”

“Maybe?” I said, unable to believe I was agreeing with Sophia. I tried to walk faster, but Sophia kept up easily. I turned the corner, into the main hall. I could see the light streaming in between the doors at the end as student after student pushed them open, never really allowing them to close.

“I’ve never seen newspapers there,” said Madison. She, at least, was a bit out-of-breath. “Our library is kind of small.”

“Not the school library,” I said. Now even my own voice was becoming out out-of-breath. Had all my morning runs been for nothing? I let myself slow, if only a bit. The crowd was becoming too thick to walk so quickly, anyway.

“One of the bigger ones,” I continued. “Like Central Library downtown. I think they’ll have copies?”

“Knows the fucking libraries,” Sophia muttered.

I aimed myself through the heart of the crowd of students squeezing themselves out the doors. I knew I wouldn’t lose Sophia and Madison in the crowd, but it was worth a shot—

“Hey!”

I glanced behind me. Sophia had shoved someone out of the way and they’d fallen. She didn’t bother glancing back at them. I wanted to say something, or at least help the fallen student—was his name Steven? Stewart? Something with an ‘S’?—but I decided against it in favor of escaping through the doors.

I shivered as I stepped outside. As poor as the heating in Winslow High was, it was still heating. It was still above freezing out, if the puddle I had to step around was any indication, but only just. My jacket was not heavy enough for the cold, but I wasn’t about to put anything in my locker, so I couldn’t really bring a heavy coat to school. I’d lucked out so far: we hadn’t had snow since the new year. Unfortunately, that would change next week, assuming the meteorologists’ predictions held up. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage, but I supposed I’d have to.

The crowd of students was much less dense outside. Unfortunately, that meant Sophia and Madison found me easily. I sighed, and resigned myself to spending the afternoon with them, as I doubted they’d leave me alone.

“We’ve driven by Central Library before,” said Madison. “It’s a neat building. All those big windows.”

“New,” I said, feeling rather grumpy, but I felt my grumpiness had a pretty good excuse. “Opened two years ago.”

“They’ll have old papers?” asked Madison, she and Sophia following me as I turned us away from the school buses and towards the street, where the normal city buses stopped. It was a sad little bus stop, with a little patch of gray grass off to its side.

“New location,” I clarified. “Old library.”

“Don’t tell me _you’re_ a nerd, too, Mads,” said Sophia. “Capes are one thing, but libraries—”

She shuddered theatrically.

“I’m not ‘Mads,’ and don’t be rude,” said Madison. She turned to me. “If we stop being rude to you, will you pitch in on this project?”

“Rude?” I asked, the word coming out with a snarl as we reached the curb. “You were a bit more than ‘rude’ to me.”

Madison looked ever-so-slightly remorseful, though it was probably just for show. Sophia only shrugged, unapologetic.

“You never fought back,” she said.

I blinked at her, and again. Never _fought back?_ Bullshit. Anytime I tried, it had only been met with worse consequences, whether from the girls or the school itself. I _couldn’t_ —

“How are we getting there, anyway?” asked Sophia. “Or are we going to stand on the curb all day? Don’t tell me you have a car, Hebert. I’d be your friend if you had a car.”

Lacking any words, I pointed at the sign for the bus stop. Madison flashed Sophia that annoying little smile, and Sophia seemed a bit embarrassed at not having caught on. She covered it up with a scowl.

At least Madison and Sophia had money for the bus. I wasn’t about to pay for them.

* * *

Some liked to say that Brockton Bay was a city on the decline, and in many ways, it was. The city had one of the largest quantities of villains of any city, and higher still per capita, and as a result, the crime rate was quite high. But downtown Brockton Bay might as well be its own city. Only those with means lived there, and those without rarely even visited, unable to afford the high-end shops and restaurants. Dad only ever made it up for meetings, and I only for the library.

Central Library sat in the heart of downtown. A four-story glass building, it sat on a plaza accompanied by more, taller glass buildings. It had the sort of modern architecture that was trying too hard, with too many lines and swooping details, but it was nice enough inside. During the day, natural light always filled it, casting dramatic shadows across the polished concrete that I supposed was supposed to look modern. At night, the shimmering lights of the tall neighboring buildings made its way in, looking almost magical.

The downside of the giant windows, though, was that even the heroic attempts of the building’s heating could not keep the freezing weather at bay.

“Wouldn’t it be a lot of newspapers, though?” asked Madison. “How could they keep it all? What if there was a fire?”

She asked too many questions.

“Would warm up the place,” said Sophia. How was she cold? She was still wearing her fluffy-looking parka, and that was over a knitted sweater. Madison, too, was bundled up, but didn’t seem to mind the cold as much.

I was surprised when they let Madison and Sophia in. While Sophia had a library card, Madison did not. But apparently you didn’t need one to enter; only to check a book out. I supposed I never showed mine when I entered, either. I’d just never really thought about it. I’d just assumed you needed one to use the library.

As soon as we were in, I found one of my favorite librarians.

“Hi, uh,” I started, as I always did, trying to ignore Sophia making faces at me behind the librarian. I still wasn’t sure on her name. Clara? Chloe? Claire? She was always helpful when I wanted to find something. “We were looking for old newspapers. Late nineteen nineties to early two thousands. How do we, uh…”

It turned out that the old papers were not stored as actual newspapers, but instead on microfiche, which could be read with specialized readers over in the corner of the third floor. It also turned out we needed to narrow our range a bit.

Madison pulled out the sheet of paper containing everything we knew about Lustrum, and scanned it for dates.

“Maybe April 2005? And a month before and after?” she suggested. “There’s not a lot to go on. We’re looking for Lustrum.”

“Lustrum?” asked the librarian. “Didn’t she, uh… you know…? To men, I mean, I—”

I’d never seen her so flustered before. Madison nodded for the three of us. Yes, _that_ Lustrum.

“You looked on our site?” asked the librarian, collecting herself. She seemed to know to direct the question at me. I nodded. Of course I had.

She smiled and shook her head a bit; I must have looked a bit more indignant than I’d meant to. Madison was paying rapt attention, apparently finding the entire concept of libraries and librarians fascinating, but Sophia seemed bored, preferring to message someone on her phone. Probably Emma. She shook her head at something amusing, and her fingers tapped across the keyboard in a fast burst of a reply. Definitely Emma.

“Strange,” said the librarian. “She wasn’t a Master, was she? They’ve had us pull things about Masters, before, when their influence spread by written word. I could ask around, but we’re not really supposed to talk about it. Newspapers aren’t a bad route, though. May I?”

She held out her hand, and Madison quickly handed over the sheet of notebook paper. It didn’t say much, other than Lustrum’s approximate age, when she was active, when she was convicted, and that it had been alleged that her group was violently misandrist and had eventually escalated to castrating men.

But it also had a note on her powers. She was a Breaker, not a Master. Why would anything about her be pulled? Had she worked with a Master?

“Didn’t even find _what_ she was convicted of?” asked the librarian. “Still, April 2005’s not a bad starting point, if that’s when she was arrested.”

We choose the same three newspapers I’d searched online—one local, one national, and one cape—and we each took a microfiche reader. They were bulky machines that looked almost like old CRT monitors, but instead worked using light projected through small translucent pieces of film, upon which the newspapers were reproduced in miniature.

I shivered again as I scanned an April 8th issue of _The Brockton World._ Warm air was supposed to rise, but it was even colder up on the third floor than it had been on the first. Then again, we were very near the windows.

“She was local, wasn’t she?” I asked, as I made a note of the missing issues for the 9th and 10th, and began to skim yet another article about yet another skirmish between the Merchants and Empire Eighty-Eight. “You’d think there would be a _bit_ more, even if Sophia’s conspiracy theories were right.”

“Was she?” asked Madison. “PHO didn’t say.”

“I thought she was,” I said, a bit uncertain. “I think my mom mentioned her, once.”

Sophia began to say something, but changed her mind. It was probably something about my mom. The thought of the imaginary words somehow still stung— but then, maybe just thinking about my mother stung.

“Who’s Nesistor?” asked Sophia. “He got sentenced to the Birdcage on… ugh, I’ve barely even reached April yet. Sentenced under Three Strikes Protection Act.”

“Three strikes?” I asked.

“Birdcage for capes who escape prison three times,” said Sophia.

“Actually,” said Madison, “it’s for capes who’ve been _convicted_ three times for anything cape-related. Passed in 1997, I think?”

Sophia grunted. She probably didn’t care about the distinction. I somehow wasn’t surprised that Madison knew.

“Found her!” exclaimed Madison. Sophia and I scooted our chairs over to the machine. It would have been much easier if they were rolling chairs. Instead, the metal chair legs screeched across the floors. Sophia’s tangled with mine, and there were several more harsh squeaks as we extricated them from each other.

“April 29th, 2005,” Madison read, “ _Lustrum,_ accused of charges ranging from drug theft in 1998 to kidnapping and assault just this month, has been convicted of all charges in the swiftest Parahuman trial we’ve yet seen. Most members of her gang remain at large, with rumors of a bio-tinker unconfirmed. She will arrive at the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center within the week, where she will be held indefinitely. She will not be able to appeal the sentence, as people cannot be removed from the prison for any reason. _The Paraporter_ remains opposed to the Birdcage, as it is a violation of fundamental rights belonging to all humans regardless of their abilities.”

Sophia snorted.

“Anyone strong enough to be sent to the Birdcage wouldn’t have gotten caught,” she said. It didn’t make much sense, and I wasn’t sure if it was an argument in favor of the prison or against. “Is that it? Nothing else? Should be something about the kidnapping, right? What issues were you missing?”

Madison shrugged. Glanced over at her notes again, but she didn’t seem to really need to read them.

“We’re all missing an issue or two around the tenth, aren’t we?” said Madison. “I think you’re onto something, Sophia.”

If it had just been me missing issues, it could have been coincidence. But all three of us?

“A bio-tinker, like Bonesaw?” asked Madison.

“Dead, or never existed, or we’d have heard of them,” said Sophia. “Or haven’t you noticed? Capes can’t keep quiet. Well, at least now we know a date to look for, Hebert. Nothing on the arrest, but may have something on the conviction.”

Sophia’s copies of _The Boston Globe_ had nothing on the trial, but mine of _The Brockton World_ did.

“Lustrum convicted,” I skimmed. “Caught by Armsmaster, Miss Militia, and Dauntless— Dauntless was around in 2005? Once had thousands to her cause… sentenced to Birdcage for drugs, assault, kidnapping, bombing a hospital… Not that much more than Madison found.”

“Yeah, Dauntless has been around for awhile,” said Madison. “1990’s, I think? He became less active once or twice, though, for a bit. Mid-90’s and mid-2000’s? A bit after this, maybe, or a bit before. They say ’cause he broke his Arclance and had to build it up again, but _I_ think it’s because he had another kid.”

“A kid?” I asked.

“ _Another?_ ” asked Sophia.

“There’s tons of speculation. All the ones you just mentioned— well, definitely Armsmaster. Just up and disappearing, and much cheerier when he came back.”

Sophia looked skeptical at the idea of a cheery Armsmaster.

“Maybe Miss Militia, too,” Madison continued. “People aren’t so sure about Dauntless, but Clockblocker’s _right there_ , and I mean—”

“Clockblocker?” said Sophia. “You cannot be serious.”

“His power’s kind of bullshit,” said Madison. “Practically screams second-generation cape. And it’s a Striker power. Isn’t Dauntless a Striker? Powers run in families, you know.”

Sophia shook her head and laughed. The sound of it was a bit too loud for the library. I hushed her, and mercifully, she lowered her voice.

“No,” she said. “Just… no.”

I shook my head, not sure what to make of Madison’s conspiracy theories, but I wasn’t sure I cared. I looked back to the screen and read through it again. _The Brockton World_ ’s blurb was barely longer than _The Paraporter_ ’s. Why was there so little on her? It didn’t make any sense.

“But Lustrum wasn’t a Master, was she?” I asked, not caring that neither of my classmates had context for my outburst. They were still arguing about Clockblocker, anyway. “She was a Breaker, right? Energy sapping, big glowing body, right? They had rumors she worked with a Tinker, but nothing about a Master. Why is there nothing…”

I read through the article a third time, trying to find any hint why it said so little, and why so little at all about Lustrum could be found. But there was nothing. No hints, no clues, no—

“Is that her?”

I jumped. Sophia was leaning over my shoulder, scrutinizing the tiny picture next to the even tinier article. I could feel her breath on my ear, too warm and humid and icky and—

Deep breath, Taylor. Stay calm. Don’t kill her, don’t call the swarm, don’t—

Breathe.

“I’m trying very hard not to maim you,” I forced out, firmly shoving Sophia out from my personal space. “It would destroy my chances at a semi-decent future. So if you would, please just _stop_.”

Sophia looked at me with that smug, amused grin of hers, and again I found myself wanting to punch someone.

“Whatever,” said Sophia as she again peered closely at the screen, although this time she kept her distance a bit better. “That her? Lustrum?”

I looked back to the screen, and to the picture of the cape being projected onto it.

“It’s her article,” I said, leaning back in my seat and away from Sophia.

She mirrored me, sitting back in her seat, the hard plastic of her chair creaking as she did. Her eyes drifted downwards as she seemed to consider for a moment whether to say anything. Her hand fiddled with her phone for a moment, but it wasn’t actually on.

After a moment, she looked up. She tried to shrug off her indecision, but still, she looked a bit uncomfortable.

“I’ve think I’ve seen her before.”


	2. The Mural

“No coat, Hebert?”

I frowned at Sophia. My fists clenched in anger, and in a futile attempt to strive for warmth. I reached for my swarm but its response was sluggish, the bugs not caring to move in the unseasonable cold that would only get colder as the afternoon turned to evening.

“And where would I keep it?” I asked. “In my locker?”

Sophia snorted. She checked her phone again—nearly five o’clock, now—and glanced down the street, but there was still no sign of Madison. Madison was the sort of girl who spent more time in extracurricular activities than she did in school, from piano and violin to soccer and field hockey— or, so I’d gathered from Sophia’s ranting before class this morning. Why she bothered ranting to _me_ I couldn’t guess.

I cradled my head in my hand as Sophia cursed Madison yet again.

“…all be gone by the time we get there,” I heard her mutter. I could only assume she was hoping for us to talk with someone, but she refused to say who. She refused to say where we were going at all. It had taken days of pestering to get her to agree to even show us.

The sound of tires grinding against damp concrete approached. A large, navy blue SUV rolled up.

“Finally,” muttered Sophia.

The passenger door opened and Madison slid out of the seat, dropping two feet to the ground, her heels clicking loudly as they hit the surface. She waved to her mom, her hands kept warm by nice knitted mittens, and closed the door behind her.

“So, where are we going?” she asked. “A villain’s lair? Is it Über? Tell me it’s not Über.”

“Few blocks. Not Über,” said Sophia. “Not a lair. What kept you?”

“Ms. Matthews—my violin teacher?—well, her sister is Kate Matthews, you know, from Channel Seven?”

In lieu of response, Sophia sighed and began walking. Madison was not discouraged.

“And I was thinking,” she continued, her voice filled with her trademark cheeriness, “if the newspapers had to yank stories about Lustrum, the TV stations would, too, right? So I asked Ms. Matthews, and we called her sister, and they _did_ have to remove stories from their archives, but they never knew why. All Kate remembers is something about a kidnapping.”

“So: nothing,” said Sophia, not bothering to glance back at Madison.

I cringed a bit at how Sophia had put it, then laughed at myself for feeling sympathy for _Madison_. But Sophia was right: aside from confirmation that stories had indeed been pulled—which we’d already put together—there _wasn’t_ anything that we hadn’t already gathered from the newspapers.

“I wasn’t finished,” said Madison, still just as obnoxiously cheery. “Kate said we should check the trial records, and that’s where mom and I were just now. But at the federal court downtown—Birdcage sentences are always delivered through federal courts, you know—the clerk said they couldn’t find any records of a trial for ‘Lustrum.’ He was pretty rude about it, actually. It’s strange, because Armsmaster and Miss Militia arrested her, and the _World_ had that writeup on her trial, so it had to have been here, right? I kinda wish Emma were on our team. Then Mr. Barnes could—”

She cut herself off with a glance towards me.

“Then again, perhaps it’s for the best she’s not.”

I grimaced. _I_ was definitely glad she wasn’t on the team.

“So,” said Sophia, again. “Nothing.”

Madison shrugged.

No trial records, and the papers and stations had to pull their stories, and we still didn’t know _why._ I growled in frustration, and Sophia shot me a strange look. Madison didn’t seem any less optimistic.

“It’s always good to have more sources, right?” said Madison. “Especially if we’re going to fill fifteen pages.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

We passed a textured cement wall whose rough white surface had been freshly sprayed with Merchants’ graffiti. Sophia scowled at it.

“Better them than Empire, though,” she muttered.

“Is this their territory?” asked Madison. “Are we meeting with them? Lustrum did drug stuff, right? Think she did it with the Merchants?”

Was that where Sophia was taking us? Wouldn’t that be dangerous? My hand began to check for the pepper spray in my pocket—

“Not their territory,” said Sophia. “They’re just being bold. Stupid. A hero or two protects the area.”

She sighed and slowed her stride for a moment to take in the graffitied wall, as if to better remember it. She glanced up and down the street. Sighed.

“Things were better under Marquis,” she said. “Fucking New Wave.”

How would she know what things were like back then? Wouldn’t she have been five or so when New Wave had captured Marquis? Typical Sophia bullshit, I supposed.

“What’s wrong with New Wave?” asked Madison.

Sophia seemed to consider what to say for a moment, as if it were too easy for her to say too much.

“Let’s just say… I don’t think _Marquis_ attacked _them,_ ” she said.

“But…” started Madison. “Do you mean they went after him? But what’s wrong with that? Unless— out of costume? You can’t mean _at home?_ Isn’t that against the rules?”

“Rules?” I asked.

“The Unwritten Rules,” said Madison, reverently. “Things capes won’t do to each other. Like killing, or attacking out of costume. Definitely no exposing secret identities.”

Sophia snorted.

“Not _that_ organized,” she said. “But yeah. No way their story’s not B.S. Protectorate covers for them, of course. Don’t think Piggot likes it much.”

She didn’t explain why the Protectorate would cover for New Wave, or why New Wave’s story must be B.S. If I asked, Sophia would probably just mysteriously say she knew people, again. Or maybe she, like Madison, read too many conspiracies on PHO.

Sophia slowed to a stop. Turned to face us.

“Those rules?” she said. “They apply today. Got it? Meet someone, see them again? You never met them. And you _don’t_ out them. I _will_ kill you.”

She looked me dead in the eyes, holding my gaze for an uncomfortably long time, then shifted to Madison, whose gaze she held even longer. Madison nodded hurriedly.

“Good,” said Sophia, more of a grunt than a word. She spun back around and rounded the corner. None of us said anything until we stopped in front of a building a few blocks later.

It was less a building than a strange sort of house, three stories plus a basement and covered with wood siding that had been salvaged from rot by a comparatively recent coat of paint. Only a foot or two of grass, yellow for the winter, separated it from the sidewalk. The few bugs that had ignored the building’s pest control and made their way inside could taste where old, damaged wood made way to new; where still more damage—some that even tasted charred—had been painted over; even bits here and there which had been left as-is. Well maintained on a budget.

_The BBQ: Brockton Bay LGBT Center_.

The sign on the door could easily be missed. The text wasn’t large, and was hard to make out between the many taped-up event posters surrounding it behind the glass, most advertising events such as ‘BBQueen,’ ‘The Bi-Bi Weekly Book Club: Bi Books for Bi’s and Friends,’ ‘Transpire: Trans Social Hour,’ and my favorite: ‘Let’s Go Build This: DIY.’

I was tempted to sign up for the DIY classes, but I still wasn’t sure why we were here. I glanced at Madison—why was I exchanging glances with _Madison?_ —but she didn’t seem to understand any better than I did.

Sophia yanked the door open, and something inside chimed with an annoying, cheery ring. She didn’t bother holding the door. She made to walk past the front desk and down the hall—

“Excuse me,” said the young man behind the front desk, his rolling chair skidding across the floor as he stood to intercept. “May I help you?”

I was a little surprised when Sophia stopped. She leaned slightly away from the man. He gave her a strange look, a frown curling beneath his beard, his bespectacled eyes scrutinizing her as if he almost recognized her, but didn’t quite.

“Yeah,” said Sophia, after a moment. “Wanted to talk with someone about the mural.”

“The mural?” he said. He blinked. “Oh. Uh… maybe…”

He glanced back at the front desk, his eyes searching for help, but he had been its only occupant.

“You should sign in,” he said. “And then maybe Lexi can help you, if she’s in her office. She’s our manager, she’d know who you should talk to. Lexi! Lexi, these girls wanna ask about the mural! Lexi!”

He motioned us over to a clipboard, and grabbed a pen for each of us out of a flower pot. Beside the pot was a bowl of miniature chocolate bars. I pointed at it and glanced at the man, but he’d vanished down the hallway, presumably to find Lexi.

I jumped as one of the chocolate bars bumped against my hand, its metallic wrapper crinkling noisily.

“Just take one,” said Sophia, shoving it against my hand again.

Lexi, it turned out, had left for the evening. Sophia sighed irritably and shot Madison a glare.

“You can still take a look,” said the man— _Greg_ , he introduced himself. “You know where it is? Just down the hall on the left. You couldn’t miss it if you tried.”

The annoying, cheery ring chimed again, and Greg promptly forgot about us as he turned to greet the newcomers: a group of three who all seemed to know each other.

Sophia sighed irritably and rolled her eyes.

Madison’s heels clicked and clacked against the hallway’s parquet floor. To our right was a gift shop; through its windows I could see a variety of stuffed animals—a unicorn caught my eye—along with various other knick-knacks, some books, and an abundance of flags of different designs, most of which I did not recognize. To our left were a few offices, including Lexi’s, doors all shut.

And then there was the mural.

_Fire._ A building ablaze in the night. Less of a building, really, and more of a house; _this_ house, the one we were in.

It was painted in a style meant to look simplistic: sharp, sweeping lines meeting each other at angles. And while the shapes were indeed simple—flames, skyline, sky—through them, you could feel the transition of flame to smoke, the distinctive Brockton Bay skyline peeking through as mere silhouette.

In front of the building stood a woman, her long hair flowing behind her, her face strong and determined. She wore cargo pants and a shawl of a top, and on her face was a distinctive mask that seemed to glow.

Her hands swung a flag. It was one of the very flags I’d just seen in the gift shop; it waved through the air victoriously, the colors of its five bars shifted by the orange light of the fire.

It was the same woman we’d seen in the newspaper.

_Lustrum._

“They made something positive out of this place.”

We spun around to find a woman: twenties, dark haired, and with a sad sort of smile.

“I was sent here, when I was a kid,” she said. “Before it was here. Harrow’s, we used to call it. Thought they could ‘fix’ me. ‘Conversion therapy,’ they called it.”

Sophia recoiled slightly, her face twisting into a hateful scowl.

“Abuse,” said Sophia.

“My family would send me again if they could,” said the woman. “Made me go through the wrong puberty, too. I’m still paying for that. Even the best medicines can only do so much. The rest’s expensive.”

She held out a hand, in which sat a small green pill, flat and scored. She popped it into her mouth, beneath her tongue.

“Did you know Lustrum?” asked Madison. “That’s her, right?”

The woman turned her attention back to the mural. She regarded it for several seconds.

Had Lustrum tried to burn this placed down, once, before it was the BBQ? If so, was that even a bad thing? Illegal, sure, but evil? I supposed it depended on her reasons.

“Caged when I was sixteen,” said the woman, her words slurred a bit as she tried to keep her tongue stationary and the pill beneath it. “Heard it was a farce of a trial, though. Like Canary’s, maybe.”

I wasn’t sure who Canary was, but Madison seemed to know, judging on how her eyes lit up. Before I could ask, she asked a question of her own.

“Are you Lexi?” asked Madison.

“Elisa,” said the woman, shaking her head. “Lexi’s the manager. I just help Dr. Thenison, sometimes.”

“He prescribes the, uh…” Sophia said, motioning at Elisa. “Right?”

“Hormones,” said Elisa. “Endocrinologist.”

Elisa seemed to give up on holding the pill beneath her tongue. She swallowed it with an awkward-looking gulp.

“Are you Taylor?” she asked me, suddenly.

My eyes darted towards Sophia, and I felt myself tense. My response came out as a sluggish question.

“Yes…?”

“Professor Hebert was one of my teachers at UB,” she said, her sad smile softening. “She always did her best to help, you know? I remember when… I always wondered if it was my call—”

She cut herself off abruptly, her eyes widening with the realization that she should not have spoken. But it was too late to take the words back, and I felt my eyes close on their own accord and my heart sink into my chest.

“I’m so sorr—” Elisa began.

“No,” I cut her off, forcing myself to speak, trying to keep my words as even as I could. “It wasn’t your call. It was mine. I was talking with her when… when it happened.”

I tried to make myself think about anything but that day.

“Know anything else?” said Sophia, as if I had said nothing. “About Lustrum.”

“You should talk with Dr. Thenison,” said Elisa. “He was around, back then. He helped found the BBQ.”

But Dr. Thenison had left for the evening—Sophia shot Madison another glare—and when we tried to see if he had time available to meet us over the next few days, we were told he was booked solid, but that we should call sometime tomorrow while he was in to see if there was a time into which he could squeeze us.

Elisa went home, leaving just Sophia, Madison, and I, along with Greg behind the desk. He wasn’t a great conversationalist.

“Who’s Canary, anyway?” I asked Madison.

She and Sophia were sitting on the fluffy green couch across from the front desk, each on their phones as they waited for Madison’s mom to arrive and drive them home. Even if I had a ride, there wouldn’t have been space for me to sit.

“And _you’re_ a nerd?” asked Sophia. I didn’t bother roll my eyes: the muscles would get sore.

“You know, the singer?” said Madison. “Bad Canary? Paige Mcabee? She’s on trial. She’s probably going to be sentenced to the Birdcage.”

“A singer? And she got three strikes?” I asked, unable to picture it. Maybe there was a reason she was called ‘Bad Canary.’

“Oh, there’s no three strikes for her,” said Madison. “She told her ex to fuck himself, and he took it literally. It was just after one of her shows. He must have been there and heard her sing—that’s how her power works. They won’t even let her talk in court, not even for her own defense, and her lawyer’s an idiot. PHO’s going nuts about it being unfair. Well, half of them, at least. The rest say she’s like the Simurgh. She’s got feathers and everything.”

What forums on PHO did Madison frequent? I only ever poked around a couple, but at least in those not everything revolved around the Simurgh.

“So what, Lustrum tried to burn down… whatever this used to be? Harrow’s?” I said.

“I don’t think that was its name,” said Madison. “And apparently.”

“Good,” said Sophia. “Fuck them.”

“But why?” I asked. “I mean—” I rushed to clarify as Sophia turns a glower my way “—not that it wasn’t good! Just… _why_ did she do it? What were _her_ reasons?”

“Don’t think the victims cared what her reasons were,” said Sophia. “She got them out. Good enough.”

Again a frustrated growl escaped me.

I shook my head and sighed, making to leave. I’d left a note for Dad at home, but it would still be better to be back before he arrived: he always liked to worry, even if I did have my pepper spray on me. I’d need to take a bus north towards the Boardwalk and connect at Seventh to—

“Where you going, Hebert?” asked Sophia.

I took a deep breath and turned back around.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You not to get frostbite,” she said.

“Oh, and you care?”

“Can’t type with frostbite.”

Of course. She had her priorities straight. It was funny, really. She had no real reason to hate me, but didn’t care if I was hurt so long as I was useful. I had every reason to hate her, but still didn’t want her hurt. Well, not too badly. Well, nothing permanent, at least, as tempted as I might sometimes be to kill her.

“Maybe _I_ don’t care,” I said, the anger rushing out of me before I could stop it. “Maybe frostbite’s better than being around you. Thought of that, Hess?”

Sophia laughed, and Madison rolled her eyes.

“Mom’s driving us home,” said Madison. “You live in the Docks, right?”

I almost expected they’d drive me down past the ferry and kick me out, but I suppose that wouldn’t have gone over so well with Madison’s mom. Instead, she drove me right to my neighborhood, and I arrived home to an empty house.

The conversation with Elisa replayed itself in my mind, starting over again each time I tried to stop it.

Most days, I tried not to think about Mom too much. But some days, I supposed, I didn’t get a choice. I didn’t like remembering the phone call. I could still hear the—

Again, I tried to stop the memories. The pain of reliving them was a pain hard to resist, but there was no point in it. There was nothing I had left to gain from its memory; no mistake left to internalize.

I almost forgot to check in on my spiders. The suit would be ready soon. Maybe a week, maybe three, but still: soon.

* * *

“Annette was a bit taken with her, back, oh…” said Dad. “A bit after we met, I think. She was involved for a year, maybe two. Maybe even met the woman, I don’t know. Don’t even remember if Lustrum was a villain back then. Capes switch sometimes, you know.”

He chewed on his bite of drumstick, the end of the bone still held within his hand. He’d brought home a whole chicken from the store, still warm. A fleck of it was stuck in his mustache.

“Do we still have anything?” I asked. “Lustrum had to have had pamphlets, if she was so influential, right?”

“Don’t think we do,” said Dad. “I poked around the attic last year, but didn’t see anything like that.”

I frowned, and pushed around the pieces of chicken on my otherwise-empty plate. Neither of us cooked much, so dinner was usually a one-note affair.

Dad shoved his chair away from the table, its rough metal feet scraping away at the already-threadbare rug. He wiped his hands against each other, and then against his jeans, as he walked off towards the little roll-top desk that sat in the kitchen corner.

“You remember Laura?” he asked, as he fought the lid: the latch wasn’t locked, but liked to pretend to be, and the cover would jam if you didn’t slide the ends up evenly.

“One of your mom’s friends,” he continued, brushing some dust off the desk’s surface. “You could give her a call. We should still have her number, in one of Anne’s books, somewhere.”

He pulled out drawer after drawer, only to realize that what he was looking for wasn’t under the rolling top, but instead in the tray beneath the desk’s surface. He didn’t bother closing the lid.

From the drawer he pulled out Mom’s old contact book. He flipped through a few pages.

“What was her last name? I always said they should sort by first,” he said. “Oh, right. Mirthton. Laura Mirthton. She had a bit of a crush on me, you know?”

He gave me a wink as he slid the contact book over to me, and I gave him my least impressed look.

“Now, she may not know enough to fill your fifteen pages,” he said. “But she’s got to know something. Maybe she’ll even have a lead for you, yeah?”

“I’m starting to think there’s no such thing,” I said. “It’s like Lustrum never existed.”

Dad’s voice lowered conspiratorially, and his tongue slid across his teeth and out the side of his mouth as he gave me a quick grin.

“Or maybe… she never did,” he said. “Maybe there _was_ a Master, and he just made us _think_ she existed!”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Nefarious reasons, of course,” said Dad. “Or, no! I got it: he did it to protect someone. Yes, to protect his dear estranged son from the evils of, uh… the Feminist Agenda!”

I chucked a chicken thigh at him.


	3. The Note

I rounded the corner to my least favorite hallway, only to find something shoved in my face.

“Here,” said Sophia, abrupt as ever. I knocked whatever it was away from me on instinct, and it fell to the linoleum floor with an odd ‘flump.’

“Maim,” I said, as she picked up whatever it was and held it aloft again. “I’m going to mai— what?”

It was big, bulky, and a grayish sort of navy blue.

“Frostbite, Hebert,” said Sophia. “Your lead better be good.”

I looked at the bundle skeptically, but couldn’t feel any lice, fleas, or anything else untoward. I flew a bug over surreptitiously—a tiny little fly; Winslow was full of them—and even it didn’t smell anything wrong or strange. I’d been practicing sensing through my bugs. I still couldn’t see through their eyes—each time I tried, I got a gigantic headache—but I could hear and smell pretty well, now. I’d been trying to practice takedowns, too, for when I went out, but it was tricky without real opponents.

Hesitantly, I took the offered coat. It was a size too small for my tall frame—Sophia wasn’t as small as Madison, but she also wasn’t large—but it was better than nothing.

“Thanks…” I said, uncertainly. Did one say ‘thanks’ to one’s hated enemies when they did something nice for the wrong reasons?

I clenched one of my fists. Was I angry? Probably. I had plenty of reason to be. She was acting so normal, as if she and her friends had never— She gave me a knowing smile, but I refused to make a scene. Not here.

“Gotten us in to see Dr. Thenison, yet?” I asked, a bit more snide than was polite.

“Still booked solid. Could crash an appointment,” she said, flinging her locker closed with an obnoxious slam.

“We are _not_ crashing someone’s appointment.”

“Maybe we could find someone who wouldn’t mind,” she said, a smirk tugging at her lips.

We collected Madison, and then Madison’s mom collected us. Madison’s field hockey practice had been cancelled due to weather: it was raining, and soon it would be snowing.

I’d thought most Winslow students took the bus, but as Madison’s mom pulled the big SUV away from the cramped roundabout, I could see a long line of cars stretching blocks down the street behind us.

“Seat heater’s the button on the left,” said Mrs. Clements.

There was more than one button, but I didn’t get a chance to examine them before Madison stretched across me to turn it on, before turning on her own. I raised an eyebrow at her, but she looked at me with a too-innocent smile that was just shy of taunting. I smothered down a scowl.

The first flakes of snow were starting to fall by the time we reached the coffee shop where we were meeting Laura Mirthton. The place was nearly empty, with only a lonely person here or there. Bouncy pop music that should have been obscured beneath conversation was instead too audible; I didn’t like it. I didn’t much care for the shop, either: the large windows let out too much heat, and a glance at the menu suggested none of the drinks were in my price range—not that I’d been planning on buying anything, anyway.

“Taylor?” called a voice, a bit too loudly for a coffee shop, doubly so for one so deserted. “Taylor!”

Laura Mirthton wore a sweater oversized enough that she seemed to swim within it, yet her personality and enthusiasm was great enough that the sweater still seemed to struggle to contain her. She bounced on the balls of her feet, her smile wide, and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose—they had dislodged when she had jumped up from her chair to greet us.

“And are these your friends?” she asked

“Yep!” said Madison, before I could issue any denial. “I’m Madison, and she’s Sophia. Taylor’s working on a group project with us.”

My skin felt like it wanted to crawl off me, but I was determined to stay calm. _Friends_ , were we? I’m sure she’d make great friends with my black widows, too. Again, the displays of seeming normalcy were getting to me. Somehow, I managed to keep my face neutral as Laura motioned for us to join her in the corner booth.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it after, Taylor,” said Laura. “For Annette’s funeral. For you and Danny, too. I had to… well, anyway. A car accident, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. People often asked, if they weren’t sure. Even if they were. They could never know enough: was it a drunk driver? Was it a semi truck? Was it at night? In the rain? I didn’t know why they asked. Maybe they were searching for some reason why it couldn’t happen to them.

“She was coming back from the store,” I continued, the words familiar yet out-of-practice. “There shouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary. She was just getting a new air mattress, for me and— me and a friend.”

“Emma?” asked Sophia. My jaw tightened, and I stared at my fingers and the folds of their knuckles.

“She’d have been fine,” I said. “But then I called her. And she answered. And…”

It was a story I’d told countless times, the words rarely changing. It got easier, with time, but it still wasn’t easy.

Laura made that face people always made, whenever I told them. Pity. Sadness. The look of a heart breaking in sympathy, but rarely with any actual empathy.

“Yeah,” said Sophia, her voice somewhere just shy of sympathetic. “Sad.”

Madison’s fingers tapped across the table, each hitting with a little thud against the gnarled wood surface. She made that little noise people do when they’re about to change the subject—the strange sound of a mouth opening, a sort of inverted ‘tsk’—then took a breath, and paused for a moment. Then—

“So… Um… We were wondering,” she said, hesitantly, glancing at me as if to see how I was doing. Why was she bothering, really? “Did Taylor tell you about our project?”

“I don’t know how much I can help,” said Laura. She sighed slightly, as if she’d rather talk about other things, and her eyes briefly glanced around the coffee shop. “I don’t really remember that much.”

“Anything would be helpful,” I said, trying to feel glad for the change of subject.

Laura’s hands wrapped around her mug of coffee, and she watched the swirling patterns of foam on its surface. Her head bobbed back and forward in rhythm to the music I still didn’t like.

“Met her?” asked Sophia.

“Annette was more into it all than me,” said Laura, shrugging slightly. “I went to a meeting or two, here or there. But Annette… she was pretty serious about it, for a few years. Then, well…”

She gestured at me as she took a sip of her coffee. Steam rose from the mug as her breath moved across the liquid’s surface.

“You were a handful,” Laura continued. “Annette was always chasing you down. She couldn’t look away for a minute. You were always climbing things and getting yourself into trouble.”

I felt my cheeks heat. I could see the amusement on Sophia’s face, though it seemed to be tinted by something else—discomfort? Why was _she_ uncomfortable? She glanced at me, and her eyes met mine briefly before she tore them away to look at something out the oversized windows. I knew I should let Laura talk, but—

“We—” I started—

“You used to try to climb the steps at BU,” Laura continued, cutting me off as if she had neither heard my attempt at interrupting her nor noticed my embarrassment. I felt my jaw tighten. “You remember? Big stone steps nearly as big as you were. Annette would stop you, but you’d just get more determined. Your face would go all—”

“Please,” I started again, my voice more firm this time as I tried to stop her before she could say anything my classmates could later use against me. “We were hoping we could talk about Lus—”

“Just like that,” Laura continued, pointing at my face. My hand hit the table, the anger I’d barely been keeping at bay all day flushing to the surface before I could stop it. But for all the force I used, the sound had still been little more than a slap, the wood holding firm, neither the table nor its supports so much as rattling.

“I’m sorry,” I said, mortified. “I’m just—”

“I understand,” she said. “It can’t be easy for you, talking about Annette like this.”

My eyes closed. She clearly did not understand. No, it wasn’t exactly easy, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. I—

“She was an out cape, you know,” said Laura. “Lustrum, I mean.”

“Like New Wave?” asked Madison, a smile popping onto her face. I found it infuriating, but maybe I’d find anything about her infuriating right now. Not just her. Sophia, too. She wasn’t even paying attention. Probably texting Emma, again.

Laura laughed, a smug smile springing onto her face.

“She beat New Wave to it,” she said. “Grace Sanders, I think her name was.”

“Oh,” said Madison, a revelation dawning on her. “Of course. Oh. My. God. I am _such_ an idiot.”

_We know, Madison,_ I narrowly avoided saying, but Sophia said it for me without saying a word at all, glancing up from her phone and raising an amused eyebrow.

“It was a Birdcage trial,” said Madison. “It would have been under her real name. Not ‘Lustrum.’ Of course there weren’t any records. I should have searched by date—”

Laura scoffed, her hands accidentally nudging her coffee mug an inch across the table.

“Trial?” she asked. “And I’m sure they were just as fair as they were in the 1998 one.”

She rolled her eyes.

“The 1998 trial?” asked Madison.

“Grace always insisted they hadn’t stolen the drugs,” said Laura. “Not that they weren’t stolen, but Joanne and Sarah weren’t arrested for possessing them, or even for buying them. What a farce. They were such a lovely couple, too… I don’t think Grace ever imagined they’d get into trouble for it.”

Laura sighed. Again, she looked down into her coffee mug, but there were no swirling patterns left, the foam all now either imbibed or dissolved.

I remembered my mom had said something similar once. She’d wondered if Lustrum had intended things to end up where they had. I’d thought she meant violence, but… She’d been talking with a friend. Had Laura been that friend?

“Grace was… infectious, almost,” said Laura. “It was very exciting, having her here—she wasn’t from Brockton, you know?—and she was so passionate. You could tell she meant well. You could see it on her face. Even if you didn’t always think her plans would work, you always wanted them to.”

“Sounds like a Master,” said Sophia, glancing up from her phone again.

Laura laughed dismissively, but didn’t bother responding. She downed the rest of her coffee like a shot of whiskey, and slammed her mug down to the table with enough force that I was surprised it did not shatter.

“You _need_ to try their pastries, Taylor,” she said. “And— Madison and Sophia, right? They’re so good. The raspberry and cream danish is amazing. My treat!”

We didn’t manage to get her to say anything more about Lustrum. As usual, I blamed Sophia, and as usual, she deserved it.

* * *

“What’s got you all touchy, Hebert?” asked Sophia as Laura pulled away in her little hybrid, leaving us behind shivering in the snow.

“You,” I said. “Both of you.”

“We’ve been nice,” said Sophia, her voice oozing condescension.

“Nice?” I asked. “Nice? You stuffed me into my locker, with— with—”

“With— with— what, Hebert?” asked Sophia. “That was last month. It was fun. Who cares?”

My eyes locked onto hers as I felt the fury ignite behind my lungs.

“Who cares, Hess?” I asked, the words coming out as a hiss. “What if I stuffed _you_ in that locker? Would you care, then?”

“Like I said, you never fought back,” she said, more defensively than last time she’d said it, a flash of irritation crossing her face. She pulled her coat more tightly around herself, and glanced at Madison for support.

“I _couldn’t_ ,” I said, nearly shouting. “And even if I could, I shouldn’t have to, just to be—”

“Hey,” said Madison. “Let’s—”

“And don’t you act so innocent, _Madison_ ,” I said. “You—”

“Yes, I was awful, I’m sorry, yada yada, happy?” she said. “Look, it’s really cold out. Can we at least get moving? The courthouse closes in an hour. I bet we can actually find records on ‘Grace Sanders’ and—”

“Nah,” said Sophia, holding up her phone and giving it a little wave. A snowflake or two caught on the screen and melted. “I’ve got something better.”

“Better?”

“Told you,” said Sophia. “I know people.”

“People,” I said, doubtfully, trying to force down the resentment I was still feeling. Hadn’t she been bullshitting?

“Wanna meet a hero, Hebert?” she asked, a smug grin I was dying to punch marring her face. “How ‘bout _two_ heroes?”

My eyebrows raised, unsure how seriously to take her. Madison was not so restrained.

“Heroes?” asked Madison, as shocked and delighted as I had ever seen a person. “Really? When? Who? Can we meet Clockblocker and Dauntless?”

“You don’t wanna meet Clockblocker,” said Sophia. “They’re sending us a car and everything. Should be here any minute.”

“Don’t they use vans?” asked Madison. “I thought the PRT used vans. Those funny black ones—”

“Nobody likes those,” said Sophia, a statement belied by Madison’s disappointed frown.

A car and everything? Why? And why would two heroes drop everything just for her? Who, exactly, did Sophia know? Was she secretly Director Piggot’s daughter?

I tried not to allow myself to feel jealousy, as I refused to be jealous of Sophia Hess. Besides, soon I’d _be_ a hero, and that was better than meeting one, any day.

The car ended up being an SUV not unlike the one belonging to Madison’s mom. I’d have expected it to be black, but it was instead white, and unmarked but for a little logo stuck to the glass.

“It’s a bit nicer than the PRT ones,” said the driver, an older woman with thinning gray hair, as Madison noted that the logo was that of the Protectorate rather than the PRT. “I drive those, too. We’re all one family in the end, you know.”

I expected it to be a short ride over to the PRT building. Instead, we went east, near where the old ferry station used to be. And then—

No way.

I craned my neck, trying to get a better look out the window. There was nothing under us but water, down a dozen feet below, rendered unreal and iridescent by what must have been a forcefield bridge.

We were going to the PHQ. I tried to see up ahead, to where the retrofitted oil rig stood wrapped in more glass than any oil rig had the right to be. Where the library downtown had been trying too hard, the PHQ’s sweeping lines were effortless, its structures glowing and shining victoriously through the iridescent bubble that surrounded them.

The driver pulled us into a little roundabout. There was no overhang, and as my eyes followed rivulets of water up the side of the forcefield bubble to where they began as falling snow, I realized no overhang was necessary. And as we exited the vehicle, we found another benefit of the forcefield: it was warmer outside the car than it had been within.

“Sophia! Are these your friends?”

My eyes widened. My mouth dropped open.

“Holy crap! You’re Miss Militia!” exclaimed Madison, bounding forward and clapping her hands rapidly, the fluff of her knitted mittens flumping against each other.

Miss Militia laughed. I supposed she got that a lot.

“Yes! I am,” she said, mirroring Madison’s glee in a manner that, from anyone else, would have seemed mocking. “You must be Madison. And Taylor?”

“Uh,” I said. “Yeah. Taylor Hebert. I, uh, hi.”

What was wrong with me? Thankfully, Madison was more than exuberant enough to make up for my awkwardness.

“Do you really make weapons?” she asked. “Can you show me? Where do they come from? Can I have one?”

Miss Militia laughed again. Did she practice making it melodious? She held out a hand, in which sat a small knife. And then that knife swirled into black and green light, before reforming into a baton, then a gun, then a strange sort of grenade, and finally back to the knife.

“I wish I could let you have something,” she continued. “But if I gave away weapons I’d have to eat a lot more than I already do—I go through so many bullets, let me tell you. Besides, what would your parents say?”

“Bet Emma doesn’t know about _that_ ,” I muttered. I liked the idea of knowing something she didn’t about her own team’s topic. Sophia snorted beside me. “Suppose you’ll just tell her, though.”

“Maybe,” she said, with her usual shrug.

“Maybe?”

“She’s competition, isn’t she?” said Sophia.

I was distracted from Sophia and Miss Militia by the arrival of another childhood hero: Armsmaster.

“Is that— is that the Halberd?” I asked, pointing at the weapon he held like a staff, forgetting to do so much as say hello. Why had I asked that? I knew what it looked like; I had no less than three Armsmaster action figures at home, along with— Well, perhaps I was trying so hard not to think about certain things that I forgot to think at all.

“Don’t embarrass me, Hebert,” muttered Sophia. I twitched, but kept myself from balling my hand into a fist.

“I mean—” I started again, trying to let my irritation push me through. “I’m Taylor. Taylor Hebert.”

How was I going to be a hero if I couldn’t even interact with other heroes? Would it be easier when I wore my mask?

“Good to meet you,” said Armsmaster, nodding in a way I felt was intended to be stoic and impressive. He continued, his head turning from mine. “Militia, should we go up to the room?”

The two heroes guided us through the PHQ’s lobby—a beautiful sort of utilitarian design—up an elevator, down a hall, and finally into a conference room titled “Hero.”

A full wall of the conference room was glass, from the floor up to the ceiling, flush, a solid pane stretching from wall to wall. Beyond it, shimmering through the blueish warm glow of the forcefield, was Brockton Bay, the snow seeming to fall peacefully down upon it.

We took our seats around the long, glass table, on which sat several stationery pads bearing the Protectorate logo, along with some pens that I could tell looked more expensive than they actually were.

There was a thunk as Sophia pulled a lever beneath her seat and something unlocked, allowing her to lean back. I decided not to copy her; it didn’t look comfortable, but then, that was like her: a lot of effort to appear lazily carefree.

“—picked them up from downtown,” Miss Militia was saying, her voice full of exasperation. “It’ll be a miracle if they don’t catch a cold.”

“There’s no evidence that cold weather leads to illness, Militia,” said Armsmaster, his own exasperation nearly matching hers. I’d have expected him to speak robotically, but his voice had a casualness his words lacked. “Now, I think you three had some questions. I apologize: there’s a lot we probably can’t tell you, but maybe the view will make up for it.”

I glanced at Sophia, then Madison, but as neither of them seemed inclined to take lead, I decided to again try my luck at speaking to heroes.

“It’s, uh, it’s about Lustrum,” I said. “We’re supposed to write fifteen pages on her. So far, we’ve barely found anything.”

Armsmaster’s mouth set itself into a thin line. Miss Militia leaned forward, her eyes pinching in sympathy.

“Have you considered asking your teacher if you could do someone else?” Miss Militia asked, as if broaching a sensitive topic, and as a flutter of irritation pulled my mouth into a frown, I realized it might just be. Something about the idea of giving in, of throwing up our hands—

“Why?” I asked. “And why’s there so little known about her? We can tell records were pulled, even from television and newspapers, but the usual reason for that is Master powers, right? Lustrum wasn’t a Master, was she?”

Miss Militia glanced at Armsmaster, and Armsmaster’s scowl deepened.

“There’s reason to believe she was working with one,” he said. “But that Master was never found.”

Was it my imagination, or had he spit out the word ‘Master?’

“You really should talk with your teacher,” said Miss Militia. “I’m sure she’ll understand.” I refrained from correcting her use of pronouns. “Looking into Lustrum… it’s not safe. Not even for heroes, and definitely not for children.”

I wanted to bristle at being called a child, but I knew such indignation was the surest sign of childishness that one could show. Sophia exhibited no such restraint, and rolled her eyes.

“I’m serious, Sophia,” said Miss Militia.

“Miss Militia is right,” said Armsmaster. “This Master’s apparent abilities are… significant. If the reports are correct… He’s the sort that can play with your mind. You’d never even know you were under his control.”

He seemed to shudder at the thought, an unpleasant, sickly frown crossing his face.

Madison leaned forward, her curiosity warring with concern and a touch of fear.

“What… what did he do? And what did _Lustrum_ do?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know,” said Miss Militia.

“Please,” I said. “We— we can handle it.”

“They always say that,” she said, sighing resignedly. Finally, she looked me in the eyes, and spoke as directly and simply as she could. “Lustrum kidnapped a boy, had him drugged, and let her Master have his way with his mind.”

I felt a breath escape me. Madison’s face turned to horror. Not even Sophia was left unfazed: her seat tilted forwards as her eyes dropped to the table, and I could see her swallow thickly.

“But… shouldn’t people know?” I asked. “The LGBT center downtown, they have a painting of her—”

“Our hands are tied,” said Armsmaster. He shot Miss Militia an irritated scowl, but I wasn’t sure why.

She gave another sigh.

“Look,” she said, pulling a pen and one of the stationery pads towards her, and began to write in orderly all-capital letters. “I can write you a note for your teacher. I’m sure she’ll understand, and if she doesn’t, you can let us know, okay?”

Again, I didn’t bother pointing out our teacher was _Mr._ Gladly. Miss Militia slid the sheet over to me. Why me, and not Sophia? Was it because I’d been the one asking the questions?

“I’m sorry we can’t say more,” she said, scooting her chair back and standing. “Armsmaster, can you show them out? I have to prepare for the briefing.”

I sighed. It had been another short meeting in which we’d learned less than we’d have liked.

Was this it? Were we going to give Mr. Gladly the note? Were we going to give up? Just like that?

We made to follow Miss Militia out the door, but Armsmaster held up a hand. He leaned over the table, his armor whirring, and scribbled a note of his own.

“She’s right,” he told us. “It’s not safe. If anything happens, or if you find out anything more, please bring it directly to me.”

He handed me the sheet of paper—me, again?—on which he’d scrawled a phone number. I glanced at Madison and Sophia, nonplussed. Something about the whole exchange left me uncomfortable, and before I could stop myself, I tagged Armsmaster with a fly.

Hallway, elevator, lobby, and then we said our goodbyes, us leaving by the same doors through which we’d entered, and Armsmaster heading back upstairs.

“That was weird. Right?” asked Madison. “That thing with Armsmaster. It was weird.”

“Does it matter? Are we even still doing this?” asked Sophia, her voice unsure. Had I heard it unsure, before? “But yeah. Something’s up. No way he’s not—”

“Shh!” I said, holding up my hand. I closed my eyes, trying to—

“What?” asked Sophia, defensive.

“Shh,” I repeated. “I’ll explain in a bit, but—”

I cut myself off as I tried to listen through the fly I’d placed on Armsmaster. It was a bad idea, spying on a hero, but I couldn’t convince myself not to. He’d arrived on a floor near the top, and gone into an office and sat down.

“Well?” he asked.

Someone sitting beside him responded, but the fly couldn’t make it out. It could barely make out what Armsmaster himself was saying.

“Don’t want to go to the Director,” he said.

I thought I heard a huff, along with another response, all muddy and strange through the fly’s hearing, but I was sure it had been Miss Militia’s voice.

“What am I supposed to do, Hannah?” he asked. “They—”

Shit. I forced myself to stop listening. If I was right— I tried to wipe the name ‘Hannah’ from my mind.

I shook my head and blinked a couple of times. Sophia and Madison were looking at me oddly.

“What?” asked Sophia.

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry. Just… having a weird thought. But yeah, Armsmaster’s definitely not telling us something. Something big.”


	4. The Trial

The lack of sunlight in the windowless classroom did little to soothe the mid-Monday tiredness stinging my eyes. I wanted little more than to curl up in bed with a mug of hot cocoa, but instead I had Gladly’s cross-functional class, and with it—

“Got the note, Hebert?”

Somewhere buried under my sigh was a lick of anger, just out of reach through the fog of drowsiness. The sight of Sophia and Madison, once enough to drive me to full alertness, now only brought a fatigue from which not even the horrible squeaking of my chair’s legs against the floor could shake me.

I let Miss Militia’s note fall to the table as I took my seat, Sophia wincing as my kneecaps immediately banged into her own.

“We’re not giving it to him,” I said.

If we did, that would be it: Gladly would give us another topic. He’d have to, with a note signed by Miss Militia herself. But what about Lustrum? I was sure that, if we kept digging, we’d find something. But if we weren’t careful…

“We might be in a bit above our heads,” said Madison, her eyes fixated on the note. “But… I— I don’t know. There’s something we’re missing. The heroes are _definitely_ hiding something. They basically rolled out a red carpet for us, with the car and the PHQ and everything. They were trying to impress us, right? So we’d do what they said? To get us to stop, before we figure out whatever they’re hiding.”

“Been reading too much PHO, Maddy,” said Sophia.

“Not ‘Maddy,’” said Madison, her mouth twitching in irritation. “And I’m just saying: there’s something there.”

“We have to keep digging,” I said. “We’ll find something.”

“Or it’ll find you,” said Sophia, her voice lacking her usual brashness. “ _If_ you find anything. And if you don’t… I can’t fail this class. Don’t think even _you_ can bullshit with what we’ve got so far.”

No, I couldn’t. What we’d found so far would fill four or five pages, if I stretched. Six if I really pushed. Maybe we could squeeze in another page or two musing on some of our more outlandish theories. _It was a Simurgh plot_ wouldn’t go far, but perhaps we’d get more mileage from _Lustrum was a shared dream manifesting out of the uncertainty in the collective consciousness as feminism transitioned into third wave, the second wave giving its last, violent throes_. The thought tugged at the corner of my mouth, and I couldn’t hold back a snort.

Wheels against linoleum distracted me from my musings.

“And how’s my Lustrous group doing, today?” asked Mr. Gladly, swiveling his stool beneath him and taking a seat beside our desk. “Found anything inter— what’s this?”

My hand snapped out to snatch away the note, but it was too late. He raised his eyebrows at the letterhead; he raised one still further as he read the note’s contents. He chuckled and shook his head.

“Can’t say I expected that,” he said, laying the note back down upon the desk. “That’s— Bet one of you’s planning on keeping that, aren’t you? Going to frame it?”

My eyes drifted over to Madison, and along the way I spotted Sophia’s doing the same; Madison rewarded us with that little innocent smile of hers.

“Well, I did keep a few capes in reserve, of course, just in case a group ran into problems,” said Mr. Gladly. He lowered his voice and sneaked a glance around the classroom. “Between you and me, some of the easier ones. Ones everyone’ll know.”

He left unsaid that we’d need an easy cape, two weeks behind that we were.

“How about it? Want a hero? How about Alexandria? Or maybe you’d rather another villain… tall, dark, and scaly himself? Lung the Vengeancebringer?”

If his chuckle was anything to go by, Gladly had thought up that title himself, and clearly thought it very clever indeed, but none of us felt up to humoring him with a laugh.

“Mr. G!”

A small groan slipped its way between my lips, but I held back an eyeroll.

“Yes, Emma?” said Mr. Gladly.

“I’m sure Sophia and Madison could join my team,” said Emma. “There’s not enough time for them to start from scratch. It wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

My ability to hold back my eyeroll, it turned out, was not without limits. My fingernails dug into my palms. Why was I upset? Shouldn’t I _want_ to be out of this godforsaken group?

“We’re not changing groups,” said Mr. Gladly firmly, his eyes lingering on me. Had I been right? Had he put Sophia, Madison, and I together in an attempt to protect me? He’d have done better to see them reprimanded, or even expelled. Unless… was there a reason he couldn’t?

“Well,” said Emma, her smug smile as grating as ever, “it’s too bad, because we’ve been finding tons of things. Of course, I might have a connection or two, you know.”

I shot Sophia a look—so much for ‘competition’—but she just raised an eyebrow and shrugged like she always did.

“We have to pick Lung, obviously,” said Madison, as Gladly walked off. Sophia disagreed, and the two of them began fighting.

Was that it?

I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to know what had happened with Lustrum. It felt important, somehow, though I wasn’t sure why. Was it personal? Maybe I wanted to know why my Mom would follow someone who’d do such horrible things as the heroes had said Lustrum had done. Or maybe it was as Laura Mirthton had said: maybe I just couldn’t let things go.

Sophia and Madison were still fighting when the bell rang. I leapt from my seat and grabbed my bag, the chair once again squeaking horribly against the floor. I pushed my legs faster; there’d be a bus downtown in just a couple minutes. I could make it, even without Madison’s mom driving—

“We’re going to the courthouse, right?” asked Madison, keeping pace beside me with her bouncing cadence.

“Thought we were doing Lung now,” I said, a bit of a bite to my voice.

“Alexandria,” said Sophia, from my other side. I sighed. Ahead, the throng of students was silhouetted by the light of the doors through which they were attempting to squeeze themselves.

I let myself slow. I wasn’t going to make that bus, was I? Not with my two hangers-on. Might as well wait out the crowd. I sighed and leaned against the hallway’s wall, its rough, matte paint giving me goosebumps that were only exacerbated by the squeaking of my sneakers against the floor as I let myself slump down an inch or two.

“Whatever,” said Madison. “We’re going, right? Even if you’re not going, I’m going.”

“Of course I’m going,” I said, letting my eyes fall closed. I ran my fingers through my hair; pulled and felt the tension against my scalp—

“Idiots gonna get yourselves killed,” said Sophia. “Or Mastered.”

“You don’t have to come, Hess,” I snapped.

“Can’t be weaker than you, Hebert, can I?”

It was such a Sophia thing to say. Why could I tell it was a lie?

* * *

The Superior Court downtown was an older building with an insufficient number of windows. Its walls were yellowing; its accents were an unpleasant shade of wood. The line for the metal detectors was long, and had Madison not canceled her swimming lessons and gotten her mom to drive us, we wouldn’t have made it through before closing time. As it was, we had a scant thirty minutes to spare. The clerk, a middle-aged man with I’m-smarter-than-you glasses and wrinkles only on his forehead, was every bit as rude as Madison had said, huffing and sighing as if we were horribly wasting his time. We had arrived at four and didn’t leave until the courthouse’s closing time of five thirty.

“Is strawberry alright?” asked Mrs. Clements, a small carton of ice cream in her hand. “Madison doesn’t like it, so it’s all we have left.”

“I don’t ‘not like’ it,” said Madison. “It just bothers my stomach.”

I wondered how strawberry ice cream in particular could bother someone’s stomach. Stomachs could be strange, I supposed.

“Strawberry’s fine,” I said, pushing back my chair. “Let me help—”

“ _You_ have homework,” she said, sternly.

I glanced at the records strewn across the Clements’s glass-top kitchen table. Although Sophia had given Madison and I threatening looks, none of us had told Madison’s mom that, technically speaking, Lustrum wasn’t our assignment anymore.

Madison was nibbling on a biscotti as she read through a sheet, blinking her eyes periodically at the cumbersome legalese. Occasionally, she asked Sophia for help deciphering something or another. Maybe Mr. Barnes had taught Sophia a thing or two?

“A lot’s redacted,” said Sophia, over the clatter of ceramic bowls moving against each other.

“The rest we know,” said Madison. “Child taken from Harold Stansfield Children’s Clinic, fed bio-tinkered drugs identical to those found in 1998, and then Mastered for— well, they don’t say why. If you can trust the prosecution, at least. It all reads like the Canary trial. Lustrum wasn’t even allowed to speak in her own defense. It doesn’t make sense. They knew _she_ wasn’t the Master, didn’t they?”

“They might not have been sure,” I said. “Maybe they only figured it out later.”

I poked at a few of the pages. There wasn’t much, and most of what was left un-redacted was rhetoric by the attorneys. Lustrum’s seemed bumbling and confused. The prosecution, meanwhile, kept referring back to the child.

“It’s weird, though,” said Madison. “The way it’s written… The names are all redacted, even the genders, and it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, but… they keep building up one of the parents. Is it just to make the jury feel sad?”

I jumped as a dark green blur swung down before me. Just a placemat, followed shortly after by a square white bowl with three large scoops of ice cream. A few moments and another green blur later, and Sophia had her own bowl.

“Could’ve been a cape,” said Sophia. “Mentions a sensitive identity here. Usually that means hero.”

She pointed at one of the pages with one hand as she scooped a spoon of ice cream into her mouth with her other. Behind her, Madison’s mom started pulling pots and pans from the hanging rack— making dinner, I supposed.

“Armsmaster, you think?” I asked, taking a bite of my own. The case seemed personal, for him. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he’d asked—not that Sophia or Madison knew about that.

“Him, a son?” asked Sophia, snorting.

“I told you!” exclaimed Madison, victoriously. “He disappeared in the early nineties, and when he came back he was all happy and giddy.”

“Armsmaster, giddy?” asked Sophia. “Although…”

“Found any pictures yet?” asked Madison, dipping the tail of her biscotti in her glass of milk. “They have those in trials, right? Exhibits, or something?”

“No idea,” I said, shuffling through a few more pages. “But I thought I saw something…”

Somewhere, in the midst of the photocopied pages, I’d seen a bit of paper with the cloudy bloom of printer toner. Just there! I extricated it from the pile of papers that was only growing less organized, and—

“Harold Stansfield Children’s Clinic?” I asked, staring at the picture. It was hard not to recognize it.

“Yeah,” said Madison. “That’s where they say she kidnapped him from.”

I spun the picture around, and pushed it towards Madison and Sophia. It stuck and tumbled against a couple other sheets. Sophia reached for the napkin holder, plucked out a paper napkin, and wiped her fingers with a surprising daintiness, before reaching for the paper I’d tossed.

“I don’t think she kidnapped him,” I said. “I think she rescued him. From _Harrow’s._ ”

On the sheet of paper, through the noisy patterns left by the copy machine, was a photograph of a burnt-out building that was less of a building and more of a house, a house Sophia, Madison, and I had visited not two weeks ago. _The BBQ._

Below it was a caption, printed in a stodgy monospace font.

_04/03/05: Remains of Harold Stansfield Children’s Clinic after attack on night of 04/02/05._

“Holy shit.”

“Language, Maddy,” said Mrs. Clements, not bothering look back from the stovetop. She twisted a burner knob; click click click whoosh—

“Not ‘Maddy,’” said Madison, with only the barest of sighs. “What about the Master, though?”

Sophia began to laugh. It was a bitter, awful laugh; at the sound of it, the strawberry ice cream seemed to turn sour in my mouth.

“There wasn’t one, was there?” I asked, quietly.

“Some ‘hero,’” said Sophia, disdainfully. “Couldn’t take his kid being… being… gay, or trans, or whatever they were…”

“The drugs,” I said, the pieces starting to fit together. I looked through the documents, trying to find any other pictures. Maybe there was one of—

“Hormones, maybe,” said Sophia. “If the kid was trans. Or puberty blockers.”

I thought I heard Madison’s mom mutter a word that might have been ‘fascinating,’ but the sound was quickly covered up as she poured something into a pan and it began to sizzle violently.

“Tinker-made…” said Madison. “If the kid’s Armsmaster’s… could, uh… they? Could they be the bio-tinker? It would fit, wouldn’t it?”

“Timeline’s wrong,” said Sophia. “Same drugs found in 1998. Before kidnapping.”

“Okay,” I said. “So Lustrum broke this kid out of the clinic and, with her bio-tinker, helped ‘em get the medicine they needed… and Armsmaster didn’t approve. Not if he sent the kid to Harrow’s. Ah!”

I snatched a leaf of paper from the pile. I’d almost missed it: it was nearly entirely blank, but for the black-and-white photo of an oblong lozenge centered within it, and the caption immediately below.

_Bio-tinker-crafted pills found during 04/08/05 raid of Grace Sanders’s residence. Quantity found: 1lb. Chemical composition matches drugs subject of 1998 trial of known Lustrum associates._

“That’s T.”

I jumped. When had Sophia gotten up? She was leaning over my shoulder, scrutinizing the picture of the tiny pill. I leaned to the side, preferring not to feel her breath on my ear.

“T?” asked Madison.

“Testosterone,” said Sophia. “Trans men take it. Some nonbinary people too. Depends.”

“Trans men are, uh—”

“Assigned female at birth,” I said. Sophia shot me a look. “What? I read. Or I research, anyway. I’ve been thinking of signing up for the DIY class at the BBQ. I thought I should learn basics, shouldn’t I?”

Sophia rolled her eyes theatrically. “Nerd,” she said, dragging out the ‘er’ nice and long.

“So the kid’s probably a boy, then?” said Madison. “He was probably taking the testosterone?”

“This is bio-tinkered, though, right?” asked Sophia. She looked apprehensive, and her eyes darted to the bench in the corner of the room, upon which we’d all tossed our bags.

“Yeah?”

Sophia offered no words of explanation. She strode to her bag and fumbled with the latches, before searching around inside until she found her phone. Then she grabbed the handle of one of the kitchen’s exterior French doors and yanked it open—it apparently stuck something awful—before making a phone call.

I exchanged a glance with Madison. Neither of us understood.

“Fascinating, I tell you,” said Madison’s mom. “I think it’s wonderful, you three doing this for your class. We never got projects like this when I was in school.”

Madison reddened slightly, but before she could say anything, the kitchen door creaked as Sophia shoved it open again.

“We need to go,” said Sophia. “Come on.”

“Not staying for dinner?” asked Mrs. Clements. “Is everything okay? Do you need a ride, or—”

“No,” said Sophia abruptly, before catching herself. “Thank you. We can take a bus. There’s… it’s about the case.”

Mrs. Clements gave a little giggle.

“Right,” she said. “The ‘case.’ I guess you’re going, too, Madison? I’ll leave dinner in the fridge for you.”

Sophia nearly dragged us out of the house. It was a ten minute walk out of the neighborhood, and another five to the nearest bus stop. A twenty minute bus ride, a five minute wait, followed by another ten minute ride, and we arrived in a slightly worn-down neighborhood not unlike my own. I thought I might have passed through once or twice. I recognized the street—Stonemast Avenue—and realized I couldn’t be all that far from home.

We walked up a driveway covered in chalk drawings. There was a yellow sun, a dark gray cloud, and a big yellow lightning bolt, each drawn in squiggly lines; I felt myself smiling, almost able to see the chalk stick held tightly within a child’s fist, jerkily moving back and forth. Just ahead of the lightning bolt was a speeding figure drawn much more carefully, done in all black, a cape trailing behind her blowing in streaks of gray wind: Alexandria.

Sophia fiddled with the door for a minute—the key seemed to jam—before letting us in. Was this her home? Why had she brought us here? Madison didn’t seem to know any more than I did.

There were noises coming from somewhere to our left—I thought I saw a kitchen down one way, and maybe a living room down the other—but rather than heading for either, Sophia led us up a flight of carpet-covered stairs.

She knocked on a door, the sound echoing within its hollow structure.

“It’s me,” she said.

The door creaked open with a little pop of the lock springing undone. Inside was a boy perhaps just shy of twenty. He opened the door wide and gestured for us to enter, raising an eyebrow at Madison and I.

Inside was a small room with wood paneling halfway up the walls, and wallpaper up the rest. Clothing was strewn everywhere. The room was sparsely decorated: an empty picture frame or two on a desk, but no photos.

“Guests?” he asked, raising an eyebrow in a manner that reminded me very much of Sophia. “Which one’s Emma?”

“Neither,” I said, a bit of irritation creeping into my voice. “I’m Taylor. She’s Madison.”

“He’s Terry,” said Sophia, motioning at him with her head. “My brother.”

“Outing me, then?” he asked Sophia. I was unable to tell if his apparent irritation was earnest or in jest. It must have been why she’d called: to get his permission, however reluctant it seemed to be.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. Immediately, I felt my face grow warm. “Sorry, I mean— it just explains some things. You’re— are you trans, then?”

“Yep,” he said, tersely. “Very.”

“Same rules as BBQ,” said Sophia. “No outing. You never even met him. I _will_ kill you.”

Terry scowled slightly and glanced towards the small window at the end of his room. He seemed to consider something for a moment, flexing his fingers testily, before shaking himself.

“Let’s get this over with, then,” he said, rather unpleasantly. “Come on.”

He led us out of the bedroom and across the hall, over to a tiny bathroom with a combination shower and tub, its flowery curtain yellowing. He pulled open the mirrored medicine cabinet, and took out a small, clear bottle containing oblong lozenges, each identical to the one we’d seen in the photo at Madison’s house, all colored a deep forest green.

Sophia took the bottle from him, examining it closely. It held little in the way of labels.

“Can I… can I hold one?” I asked, a thought striking me.

Terry looked at me quizzically, before sighing.

“Fine,” he said, brusquely. Sophia opened the bottle, jostling me as she tried to maneuver her arms in the limited space. She tapped it carefully against her palm, sliding out a single pill which she gingerly handed over.

I peered at it. It looked normal enough. Like a gel, maybe. I wasn’t sure. But didn’t pills usually have markings to help identify them? This one had none.

“What’s got you on edge?” asked Sophia. I looked up, but she wasn’t talking to me. “Need me to yell at Ste—”

“No, no,” said Terry. “It’s just…”

I thought I saw him shrug, but my attention had returned to the pill. I briefly glanced up again. None of them were looking, so I had a fly buzz over.

“Do they work well?” asked Madison.

“Yes.”

“No problems?” asked Sophia, an edge to her voice. “Nothing wrong? Strange? You don’t, like—”

“It’s just testosterone,” he said.

I checked again—they still weren’t looking—before having the fly land on the pill and taste it. Only after I’d done it did the guilt set in: Terry would be taking it later, wouldn’t he? I should probably—

“Ah!” I yelled, dropping the pill. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”

“Fucking Hebert,” Sophia muttered.

I ducked down as if to pick it up, accidentally head-butting Sophia’s leg on the way.

“No, no,” said Terry, sighing heavily. “I’ll get it later. Can’t take it now, anyway.”

“Where did you get them?” asked Madison. But I could tell from the way she said it that she already knew the answer. After all, hadn’t the pill Elisa had taken been the same shade of green?

Was our bio-tinker still active? Did they perhaps sign their work in forest green? Something was still off about it all. Messy, almost. Was that just how things were, in real life? Or was there still a piece we were missing?

“At— at the BBQ,” said Terry. “Dr. Thenison. It’s— they subsidize hormones for people who can’t, uh…”

“Dr. Thenison?” I asked. “We’ve not been able to get in to see him.”

“Good luck with that,” said Terry.

“Why?” asked Sophia.

Terry sighed again.

“The BBQ was attacked this weekend, Sophia,” he said. “Dr. Thenison’s missing.”


	5. The Tinker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I messed up my timelines a bit. I thought a few things may have happened earlier than they did. For the purposes of this story, the Protectorate was created sometime around 1985 or 1986. There are other ways to make it work, but they are messy, and I’m particular about some characters’ ages.
> 
> Thanks for the assistance with puns. You know who you are. Thanks to EtchJetty for beta-ing!

Dim orange embers of the setting sun faded up through teal and into the night, the distinctive Brockton Bay skyline silhouetted against it, the BBQ still standing beneath. The door’s glass pane was gone, along with all its signs, replaced by a sheet of plywood against which was taped a sheet of paper:

_Les-Be-Ending This Disrepair: Donate at bbqlgbt.org/donate_

“I gave what I could,” said Terry. Sophia hadn’t wanted him to come with us. I didn’t really understand why: he wouldn’t be in any more danger than any of us. If anything, shouldn’t he be safer? He was older, and legally an adult. But as much as Sophia didn’t want him to accompany us, she wanted to poke around the BBQ more. I wasn’t sure what she expected to find.

There were more bugs inside than there’d been last time we’d visited. I could feel the cracks they’d found between the broken windows’ hastily-nailed boards. Many congregated in what seemed to be a kitchen, if the crumbs of food the ants were carting away were any indication. I could feel them leaving a trail behind for others to follow, each ant laying it on thicker than the last.

I gathered as many bugs as I could and had them begin searching the building. What was I looking for? I hoped I would recognize it if I found it.

Were anyone watching us, they’d have had plenty of reason to be suspicious. We were four teenagers approaching an empty building on a weeknight. The furtive glances Sophia, Madison, and Terry kept sending up and down the street only made it worse. But there was nobody watching, and even if there were, I doubted anyone would care. They never did.

“We just need some bobby pins, right?” asked Madison, reaching up for her hair as she considered the locked door. “It can’t be that hard.”

Sophia shot Madison a withering glare. She took a moment to size up the door, then rotated and shoved. The wood plank held easily, but the lock tore through the doorjamb with an awful ripping sound.

“Sophia!” exclaimed Terry, his voice echoing off a wall across the street. Madison shushed him. Sophia didn’t bother.

Streaks of moonlight and dusk filtered in through the window or two that were still intact, casting sharp shadows upon the parquet floor. I reached for the light switch, but Sophia motioned for me to stop. She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight. I rolled my eyes. Were anyone watching—which, I had my bugs double-check, they were not—the actual light would look far less suspect than a flashlight. But when I tried to flip the switch, nothing happened.

Madison pulled out her own phone, and after a moment’s pause, Terry followed suit, his face sour and uncomfortable even though he’d been the one to insist upon joining us.

The harsh light of the phones reflected horribly against the parquet, collapsing its color into a sort of blueish gray. I almost missed the scorch marks beneath the glare, and only noticed as Sophia’s shoe scraped against one, smearing the soot across the otherwise-undamaged floor.

Shouldn’t the floor have caught aflame? If it hadn’t, what had caused the marks? As my eyes drifted up to the wall above, and where pieces of shrapnel had blown through it, I realized there hadn’t been a fire. There’d been an explosion.

“Nazis would just burn the place,” said Sophia, quietly. “They’ve tried.”

As we stepped into the hall, the parquet and its scorch marks were obscured by a thickening layer of shimmering dust. To the left there was a chunk of plaster, then another, and then some more; to the right, little shards of gift shop window glinted up at us.

Madison gasped as she tilted her phone’s light up and caught the hole where Dr. Thenison’s office door ought to have been. She panned the light down the hall; the other doors had fared no better.

We stepped over the rubble as best we could, but some still found its way beneath our feet, crunching and crushing and bending under our weight.

We made our way to the end of the hall, to where it opened up into what, were the BBQ the house it sometimes seemed to be, might have been a living room. Over where the mural ought to have been there were now only bits and pieces of wall—a brushstroke or two of smoky sky here, an ember of painted flame there. And in the middle, where Lustrum had stood, nothing remained but for a hole into the next room, chunks of wood and plaster littering its carpet floor.

Terry knelt down and rested his hand upon a piece. For a moment, I thought it was Lustrum’s head. Instead, it was a chunk of flag; I could almost make out the stripes under the cool light of his phone’s flash.

“It’s because of us,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

I clenched my fist, something heavy seeming to sink within my stomach. My swarm contracted slightly, pulling itself towards me. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself before the bugs could emerge from their hiding places within the walls and beneath the rubble.

Madison slowly turned away from the remains of the mural, and for the first time, I found myself unable to discern what she was thinking. I followed her as she made her way to Dr. Thenison’s office.

“These look like records of medication given out,” said Madison, her voice quieter than usual. “But there’s nothing showing where they actually got any of it from. I guess it makes sense, if a Tinker’s making it…”

A clang echoed through the room as Terry bumped a shard of what used to be the office door into a metal trash can. Madison yelped, her hand reaching to her heart as she spun around. She shot me an odd look, as if surprised that I had barely jumped; I’d felt Terry approaching through my bugs.

I stilled. It was easy to confuse my bugs’ senses with each other when I wasn’t paying attention, but I thought I tasted—

With barely a ‘sorry’ to Terry as I jostled him on my way out of the office, I strode down the hall: one door, two… There. The nameplate had fallen to the floor. I knelt and picked it up, the grit of crumbled plaster instantly coating my hands. I tried to angle it to catch the light—

_Elisa Adams_

“We need to find Elisa,” I said.

“Elisa?” asked Madison, approaching behind me. “I thought we needed to find Thenison.”

“I…” I started. But what could I say? I knew we had to find Elisa, but I couldn’t explain _how_ I knew. Not unless I…

I bit my lip. I didn’t want to. I hadn’t even told my own father. I definitely didn’t want to tell Sophia and Madison. But… My eyes drifted back down to the nameplate, then to what was left of the office door. My grip on the nameplate tightened, its sharp edges digging into my fingers. I could feel Sophia nearing, bugs disappearing from my senses with each footstep.

Madison shrieked as my bugs all left their hiding spots and began to stream across the floor. Had I let my control drop? Or was I doing this on purpose? I wasn’t sure, but—

“I’m a cape,” I said. “Bugs.”

I brought my flies and gnats into the room and twisted them into a swirl, their forms glittering under the flashlights’ beams as they slowly pulsed in time with the breaths I was trying to keep steady.

“Shit,” said Sophia, the word escaping her almost as a laugh.

“This is her office,” I said, lifting the nameplate slightly. “The bugs’ve searched it. There’s a safe inside, under the desk, over by the computer. Not a good one. Not airtight. The ants taste pills. Lots of them, with coatings like Terry’s.”

“I know a cape?” I heard Madison mutter. I shot her a contemptuous glare over my shoulder. _That_ was what she was thinking about? “Wait, but I haven’t heard of you. Are you a hero? A villain? If you were a villain, would you tell me?”

“Madison,” said Sophia. “Shut up.”

She glanced from Madison, who didn’t look any less excited, over to Terry. Even in the dim light, I could see the tension in his arms—

“You don’t tell anyone. Got it? Not about her,” Sophia said, striding forward and brushing past me into Elisa’s office. “And not about me.”

And then, Sophia ducked down by the computer. Her hand reached under the desk and—

I blinked. What—

Vaguely, I was aware of Sophia pulling a handful of small, reflective objects _through_ the safe’s wall. But—

“No way…” I heard Madison say, somewhere in the distance. “Just… wow. I mean— right. Pill bottles. Yeah. Some of these don’t look like they’ve ever been used: they’re empty and sealed.”

“How’d she fill them?” asked Sophia. “There a lab? It’d have to be here.”

“There’s no room for one.” Terry, now. “I’ve seen every inch of this place.”

“Still. She could be the Tinker.”

But—

“But she’s too young,” said Madison. I wished she would be quiet, just for a minute. Sophia’s power: I knew it from somewhere. Not a villain, but— “The timelines don’t match up. Except… the drugs in ’98… they can’t have been Tinker-made. They were stolen, right?”

“2005 drugs were identical,” said Sophia. “Tinkers don’t do ‘identical.’ Not to normal, stolen shit.”

But—

“But—”

“You’re supposed to be a hero.”

At first, I didn’t realize I had spoken. Madison’s voice trailed off as she looked at me.

“She’s Shadow Stalker, right?” asked Madison, but I barely noticed. My vision seemed to shrink as if I was peering down a long tunnel; at the tunnel’s end was Sophia.

“You were supposed to be a hero,” I said, my voice shaking. “Instead, you’re— you’re—”

My breath burned. I felt lightheaded. I could barely see her, the room, or anything. I could feel my fingernails biting into my palms but I didn’t care, I—

“Hebert—”

“Did Winslow know? Are you why they never believed me?” I demanded, ignoring the wetness upon my cheeks, trying to find some measure of satisfaction in the sight of Sophia’s widening eyes. Was she afraid? “Nobody ever believed— I thought it was because Emma’s dad, but— I needed a fucking hero, I needed one because of you, you and— and—”

“Hebert—” started Sophia, but I wasn’t finished. Everything I’d been trying not to feel these past few weeks was screaming at me all at once, and I—

“Taylor—” started Madison, but I—

“I needed a hero,” I hissed. I tried to sink into my swarm, only to realize I was already swimming within it; it was answering my call, rushing across the floor all around us, minuscule feet chittering and chattering against the parquet and dust and rubble— “Instead I got you.”

“Hebert! Hebert! Taylor, you need to chill the—”

I felt someone move towards me. Who? I’d lost track and I couldn’t tell and I didn’t care. I reached down for my pepper spray. I wasn’t sure who I’d use it on, but did it matter? All I needed was an excuse, and if Sophia breathing wasn’t excuse enough, I’d think of something, it wouldn’t be hard—

“Hey! Taylor!”

Madison clapped her hands—how had she made it so loud? The sharp, biting sound rang in my ears, startling me from the depths of my fury.

“Kill her later,” said Madison, her casual words belied by her shaking voice. “I found something.”

Neither Sophia nor I made to move. She was still staring at me, her eyes wide wide, her expression one I couldn’t quite read: a strange mixture of horror and fear and confusion. My hand fell open, Elisa’s nameplate falling to the floor with a clatter, its shape now bent and twisted. My fingers twitched once, then again, as if to strangle Sophia—

“Taylor,” said Madison, her voice quieter now, and shaking less. “I think it’s your mom.”

It took several seconds for me to parse her words. Dazedly, slowly, I turned my head away from Sophia and over to Madison. Not far. She was standing just beside Sophia, an empty little bottle in her hand.

But she wasn’t looking at the bottle. She was looking at a picture frame sitting upon the desk. I couldn’t see what it held; I could only see its rear, and the long shadow it cast within the beam of light emitted by Madison’s phone.

My eyes darted over to Sophia, who was still standing as if transfixed. As her eyes slid over towards the frame, I tried to make my feet move from under me. One step, then another, only vaguely aware of the hundreds of bugs dying beneath my feet as I walked.

I picked up the frame more roughly than I’d intended, and turned it over only to realize I couldn’t make out its contents. It was too dark to see properly; I suddenly realized I must have been using my bugs to navigate.

The only words that wanted to reach my lips were bitter and foul. Before I could find any more suitable, Madison answered my unspoken request and leaned her phone over, the blueish gray of its light illuminating the picture.

I recognized everything in the frame. A little office with its roll-top desk and bookshelf too large for the space. A solitary plant by the window, straining to reach for the light. Elisa, standing in the middle, a book in the crook of her arm; her hair was shorter, her face somehow different, but she was still her. To her left stood Laura Mirthton, an oversized sweater over her shirt and tie, a warm smile on her face and her arm around Elisa’s shoulder. And to Elisa’s right stood a woman I’d not seen in almost three years. _Mom._

“Is it her?” asked Madison. “She has your hair. I thought…”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Maybe Laura would know where Elisa is,” suggested Madison, her voice unnaturally soft. Was she trying not to upset me? If so, too late: her existence was enough to bother me at the best of times, and these were not the best of times.

“On it,” I heard Sophia mutter. I glanced at her, and felt that anger threaten to flush forward again, but I yanked it back down until it settled itself somewhere behind my lungs, where it sat and pulled on my every breath.

I turned back to Madison. She was still holding the empty pill bottle in her hand. Her eyes dropped to the floor, still lined with my bugs, all eerily stationary. After a moment, her eyes lifted again to the bottle, and finally, up to me.

“Nothing makes sense,” she said, her voice still quiet. She regarded me carefully as she spoke, as if afraid I’d lash out. “Sophia’s right. Laura told us the 1998 drugs were stolen. If the 2005 drugs are chemically identical, how could they be bio-tinkered?”

I rolled my eyes at her stupidity.

“A Tinker could have made the equipment,” I said, my voice biting.

“Elisa _could_ be the Tinker, then,” said Madison. “Armsmaster’s daughter! It would fit. She has to be about the right age. She’s probably who Lustrum rescued from—”

“We don’t know any of this,” I said, laughing almost mockingly. “So she went to Harrow’s. She wasn’t the only one. She could be his daughter, or she might not be. An hour ago, we thought we were looking for a son! Maybe Armsmaster sent someone to Harrow’s, or maybe he sent no one at all. We don’t know. Elisa could be the bio-tinker, or she could have just worked with one. We know nothing. _Nothing._ ”

“No,” said Sophia. My hand twitched, and my bugs gave a warning rattle. “We don’t. But Laura does. Got her address. Fifteen minute bus ride.”

“Address?” I said.

“All this, Hebert?” she said, and my hand twitched once more. “Taylor,” she tried again, as if somehow that would make it better. “Doesn’t happen on accident. This is serious. I messaged Militia.”

“Militia? You mean Miss Militia?” asked Terry. “Oh. Because you’re—”

“Can’t call Armsmaster,” she said. “Not if he’s in on it. And _you’re_ not coming.”

She shot Terry a pointed look. He met her gaze without flinching.

“We don’t know if he’s involved, Hess,” I said. “Anyone could be in on it. Even ‘Militia.’”

Sophia rolled her eyes at me. She ducked down under the desk and again used Shadow Stalker’s power to reach in, before pulling out a shoebox.

“Come on,” she said.

She didn’t hesitate to walk over the sea of bugs I’d left upon the floor, loud crunches of cockroach shells sounding in her wake. I almost sent a couple skittering up her feet.

“Uh… Taylor,” said Terry. “Would you mind moving the bugs?”

“Fine,” I said, forcing the word out.

The sea of bugs parted before us. Tentatively, he began to walk. Madison glanced at me and opened her mouth as if to say something, but at my raised brow she only looked away again.

We walked down the hall, pieces of glass and plaster again finding their way beneath our soles.

Sophia closed the door gently behind us, but the wind blew it back open. With a sigh, she went back inside and closed the door again. Something clunked against the plank of plywood and the door closed more firmly. A moment later, a dark shadow swept through before materializing back into Sophia.

My hand twitched again, and I could feel the swarm of bugs I’d left inside jolt and shudder.

“Apartment downtown,” said Sophia, walking down the sidewalk. The street lamps cast an angry orange light upon its surface, but failed to bring any to the strip of grass by its side. “Mile north or so.”

Even the sounds of passing cars were distant as we reached the bus stop. Madison pulled at the top of the shoebox, before letting the lid slap down again. A moment later, she repeated the gesture. Another moment, and—

“Stop it,” I hissed.

As soon as we sat down upon the bus’s bench seats, Madison yanked off the lid and shoved it at Terry.

“That could be private,” he offered half-heartedly, whether because he knew Madison would ignore him or because he too wanted to know what was inside, I didn’t know.

Madison started rifling through the box’s contents, never mind that we couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes away from Laura’s apartment. There were pens and pencils and erasers and a couple of other odds and ends, all piled atop a messy stack of papers.

“You shouldn’t have called Miss Militia,” I said to Sophia, again. “Even if she’s not in on it, do you _really_ think she’s gonna believe us?”

Sophia shrugged, and I nearly snarled at her.

“We don’t even know there’s a Tinker,” I said. “If there wasn’t a Master…”

“Drugs obviously aren’t normal,” said Sophia. “Has to be a Tinker. Armsmaster’s kid fits. ‘Specially with how he was acting.”

I rolled my eyes at her again, but she wasn’t actually wrong. The drugs definitely _weren’t_ normal. I’d never seen pills quite so green before. And both Elisa’s and Terry’s were the exact same shade. That couldn’t be coincidence, could it? The way it had sat in Elisa’s hand—

“Elisa dropped out of UB?” said Madison, suddenly. “2008. It wasn’t because of grades, either. She was a senior. Wasn’t she just nineteen?”

“2008?” I asked. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. I tried to remind myself of how little we actually _knew_ , no matter how much we may have thought we’d guessed—

“Who’s— oh,” said Madison. “Never mind. It must be Elisa’s name. From before, I mean.”

She handed me an envelope and went back to digging through the shoebox. The envelope was of a heavy off-white stock, with little specs dotting it here and there. There was a name on the front that out of respect I did my best not to see. But there was something familiar…

I opened it, and pulled out the card within. Simple and plain: just a notecard with a few words scribbled across it.

_I ONLY WANT WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU,_ it said, with that name tacked on awkwardly at the end. _I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU. — MOM_

“The handwriting,” said Madison abruptly, looking over my shoulder.

And all at once it fit into place: the familiar handwriting, with its orderly all-capital letters; the green shade of the pills, a shade I knew I’d seen somewhere else, too; the impossibility of the pills being Tinker-made; that core aspects of powers often ran in families, even if their details changed…

“Um,” said Terry. “Is that supposed to be our stop? Because…”

Madison, Sophia, and I turned as one to look out the windshield at the end of the bus. Across the intersection stood an apartment building, and out front…

Black vans. And— I twisted myself around and tried to peer out the actual window at my back. My forehead dug into the little knob that one could pull to slide it open an inch as I strained to see the two people standing out front of the building, their hands behind their backs, their mouths and noses obscured by something blobby and thick. But even through my strain, even under the orange glow of the streetlights, I recognized them easily:

Laura and Elisa. And behind them, one hand holding a phone to her ear, her other gently resting upon Elisa’s shoulder, was Miss Militia.

My bugs strained to listen as Miss Militia pulled the phone away and looked over her shoulder to the PRT agents standing behind her.

“Trace is in,” she said. “They’re nearby.”

I spun back around. I could feel the blood rushing from my face; I shoved words out of my mouth:

“She knows we’re here.”

 


	6. The Plan

“Shit,” I said. “She’s— phones. Now.”

I looked to the bus driver—not paying attention, headphones in—then across the street to where Miss Militia still stood, PRT officers bursting into action around her. Then to the ground several feet below us, and finally, as I began to pull off my jacket, back to Sophia, Madison, and Terry. None of them had moved.

“Now!” I said, stopping myself just short of a yell.

Sophia’s hands dove into her pockets, searching until she found not one phone, but two, one much older and beat up than the other. Madison followed, and finally, reluctantly, so did Terry.

I stuffed the phones into my jacket’s pockets, taking just enough time to securely zip them up. Then I reached behind me to that little knob on the bus window, and pulled. The window only slid open a few inches, but it was just enough to squeeze the jacket through. I couldn’t hear it land. I hoped that meant _she_ couldn’t, either.

“But—” Terry started.

“Get down,” I hissed, ducking. _They’re nearby,_ Miss Militia had said. She didn’t know exactly where. Didn’t know we were on the bus. It would take them time to cordon off the area; by then, perhaps…

The light turned green. The bus began to move. Breathe. I needed to breathe. I could stay calm if I could just breathe… I expected the bus to stop at any moment. For Miss Militia to charge onboard and find us…

The bus passed the stop. Continued. One block… Another…

I let out a breath. Sophia started to say something, but I held up a hand, not dropping it until Miss Militia and all her PRT officers were outside my range.

“A few more blocks,” I said quietly. “Then we should get off.”

“Explain,” said Sophia. I bristled slightly at the command, but shoved the feeling aside.

I patted around myself, fruitlessly searching for the notecard. Had it fallen with the jacket? I felt fear grab at me, and—

Madison pushed the card into my hand. I tried to catch my breath. I handed it to Sophia, my fingers accidentally bending and denting it; I couldn’t quite control the tension in my muscles. Sophia took it and angled it so Terry could read along with her.

“The handwriting’s Miss Militia’s,” said Madison. “It’s the same as on the note she wrote for Gladly. She’s Elisa’s mom.”

Sophia handed the note back to Madison. Was her hand shaking? I couldn’t quite tell. Terry’s mouth opened as if he wanted to say something, but no words came out.

“She knew we were nearby,” I said. “She said something about a trace. I think she was tracking our phones.”

“Of course she was,” said Sophia. Not condescending. Only resigned.

“It makes sense,” said Madison. “Powers run in families, right? Miss Militia’s power is to make weapons. Real weapons, ones that already exist. Elisa’s is to make medicine, _real_ medicine; it’s why her drugs were chemically a match for the ones found in 1998. That’s what her power does.”

“Illegal,” said Sophia. “Selling the drugs.”

“Maybe,” said Madison. “If she was selling them.”

“But the FDA—” I started, belatedly feeling foolish. We needed to come up with a plan, not sit here chatting about whether Elisa had been breaking laws.

“Maybe she had permission,” said Madison. “Or maybe there’s a loophole for certain kinds of Parahuman powers. She’s a lot like Panacea, isn’t she? She could be doing the same thing.”

“Or she does it illegally,” I said. “It doesn’t matt—”

“She wouldn’t,” said Terry, almost as if he knew her. He probably did: they would have run into each other at the BBQ.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and Terry scowled. “What are we going to do? We can’t go home—”

“Tell Armsmaster,” said Sophia. “He’s not in on it, way he was looking at Militia.”

“Are you fu—” I started, only just catching myself. “Because telling Militia worked out so well? No. No way.”

“They can’t all be in on it, Hebert,” said Sophia.

“And why can’t they?” I challenged. “They could be, even the Director, even Costa-Brown—”

“I need to call my mom,” said Madison. “She’ll be—”

“Can’t,” said Sophia. “They’ll be listening. Trace the call.”

“But…” Madison started, only to trail off biting her lip. She looked unsure, even afraid.

“My dad,” I said softly, not really to any of my companions, and none of them seemed to hear me anyway, none except for Terry. He looked up at me with a grim smile that managed to be reassuring.

“Next stop,” said Sophia, reaching up to pull the cord. I nodded, not really looking at her. We’d stayed on the bus too long already.

“What’s her plan?” asked Terry. For a moment I thought he was talking about Sophia. “She takes us in. Fine. Then what? We’d just tell people—”

“She’ll say we’re Mastered,” I said. I stood, grabbing onto a rail for support as the bus moved. Madison began to hurriedly stuff papers and trinkets back into the shoebox.

“All of us?” said Terry. “And when the effect doesn’t show signs of wearing off? Then what?”

“She got Lustrum sent to the Birdcage,” I said. “I don’t want to find out what she’d do to us.”

“Takes more than one person to send someone to the ‘cage,” said Sophia.

“And you want us to contact Armsmaster?” I said.

“Not in person,” she said. “Just sayin’.”

“Like he wouldn’t have a way to trace us,” I said.

Sophia shrugged. My hand twitched. The bus pulled into the stop.

“Need somewhere to crash,” said Sophia. “Warehouse, maybe. Some abandoned ones near here.”

We filed out of the bus. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering slightly as the cold evening air brushed across my skin. The bus pulled away behind us, and the loud hum of its engine faded away into the distance.

We passed one warehouse, then another, Sophia shaking her head at each. We were somewhere in the southern end of the Docks, not more than a mile out from downtown, still a couple miles south from home.

“No,” I said, as Sophia sized up a warehouse done up in tasteful, non-denominational graffiti. “Three people inside.”

We passed by four more before finding one I let her check out. With a quick glance up and down the street she turned immaterial and stepped through the door, and a few moments later she opened it from the inside.

The warehouse was packed with row after row of metal shelving, upon which wooden and cardboard crates were stacked high, each inked with monochromatic labels. I stared for a moment at a label I recognized.

_Sloan Peach Company_

I’d opened a can just a day or two ago. I’d put them in a salad for Dad and I— I shook myself.

“Emergency stores,” said Sophia. “For Endbringers.”

“How are we supposed to sleep?” asked Madison.

“Best you can,” said Sophia. “We can plan tomorrow.”

“But we need—”

“Tomorrow,” said Sophia, dumping her backpack on the cold cement ground a few feet away and plopping herself down beside it. She began to rummage around inside the bag.

We didn’t even have blankets. And my jacket—

“Frostbite,” grunted Sophia, tossing me a spare sweater. It wasn’t freezing out, anymore, but I supposed that wasn’t the point.

“Thanks,” I muttered, having difficulty mustering up the loathing I’d felt earlier in the evening. Everything felt as if at a distance, every feeling as if through a far-away barrier. It was not happening to me, but to someone else whom I was vaguely aware of watching.

I let my own backpack fall to the floor. The books inside thumped; I could almost see the dents in the corners of their hardcovers, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“My mom will worry,” said Madison. She’d sat herself on a crate, awkwardly leaning forward to dodge the shelf above. “She… I don’t want her to worry. I… I just wish…”

It was the first time I’d seen Madison cry. I’d seen her fake tears before. The teachers had always bought it. This was different.

Sophia grunted, already laying down. Terry looked at Madison, then helplessly to me, as if he somehow felt I had a better idea of how to react.

For awhile I stood and watched Madison cry, not sure what I was feeling, if I was feeling anything at all. Finally, I moved, not really in control of my own motions. I sat down beside Madison. Didn’t touch her. Just sat.

“My dad,” I said. Out the corner of my eye I saw Terry lay down beside Sophia. “I… yeah.”

I was trying not to think about him. About how worried he’d be when I didn’t arrive home. Of his distress if the PRT showed up looking for me. Had they shown up already? I didn’t know. I wished my bugs would let me reach him.

I jumped slightly as Madison leaned her head against my shoulder. Again I felt as if there was something I ought to be feeling, trapped somewhere behind that far-away barrier. Slowly, my movements jolting and unsure, I wound my arm around Madison and gave her an awkward pat.

Stale warehouse air brushed my cheeks, cooling tears I couldn’t remember shedding. My free hand tried clumsily to brush them away, succeeding only in knocking my glasses ajar, leaving the nose pads unbalanced in that irritating way I never could ignore. But somehow, the unbalanced nose pads didn’t seem so important just now.

Eventually we each laid down. For a while I stared up at the ceiling, my eyes following the unevenly placed metal slats holding up a thin layer of insulation. The cold floor pressed against my head and shoulder blades; a comfort, even if not comfortable.

Something approximating sleep took me several times, each time fading away back into consciousness. 

I couldn’t see a way out. They could paint anything we said as delusions put in place by a Master, and that was amongst the nicer things they could do. To what lengths would they be willing to go?

* * *

“Hebert,” said a voice. Something shoved me. I twisted away from it. “Taylor.”

My eyes slowly opened to the sight of Sophia’s face too close to mine. I hurriedly scooted myself away and tried to bring my suddenly-racing breathing under control.

“Got a plan?” she asked.

“Post it all online,” I said. It wasn’t a serious plan, but I didn’t have any of those. I doubted any were possible.

“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” she said. She tossed something by my side. I tried to look at it, but—

She shoved something at my face. Oh. Glasses. I took them and looked at what she had tossed.

It was a newspaper. On its cover was something about the new park the mayor wanted the city to build. I looked back up to Sophia, not understanding her apparent non-sequitur.

She rolled her eyes and flipped the newspaper over. Below the fold were four faces I immediately recognized, and beneath, a headline:

_Missing, Presumed Mastered_

“Seriously,” I said. “How did you find out?”

“Someone recognized me,” she said, shrugging.

“You went out?” I said. “Alone? Were you followed back? You—”

“She’s an idiot,” said Terry.

“It’s fine,” said Sophia. “Was trying to get— Whatever. Anyway, can’t exactly go to the library and grab a computer.”

“Can we go _anywhere?_” asked Madison, despondent. She was laying sprawled carelessly across the floor.

Sophia grunted and tossed something else on the ground. I stared for a moment before recognizing them as domino masks, cut broadly to cover as much of the face as possible.

“These don’t really—” I began.

“Hoods, Taylor,” said Sophia, as if I were an idiot. “Nobody needs to see your precious hair. Be fine so long as no one looks too close.”

I picked up one of the masks. Gave the elastic strap a snap. Tossed one at Madison. It hit her in the face, and she yelped. She fumbled around for a moment before managing to grab it, and spent another trying to figure out what, precisely, it was. Once she did, she couldn’t put it on fast enough, and a small, bittersweet smile crept onto her face.

“Won’t help,” I said. “Nobody will believe us, anyway.”

“Armsmaster might,” said Sophia. “Or Piggot.”

“They wouldn’t help us even if they believed us,” I said. “Definitely not if they realize Lustrum shouldn’t be in the Birdcage. And that’s _if_ they weren’t already in on it.”

“Nah. With how Armsmaster was looking at Militia…” said Sophia. “And Piggot— she’ll let people get away with shit, but she won’t let capes ruin normal people’s lives.”

Really?

“Won’t she?” I asked, giving Sophia a flat stare.

“If she knew about that, Hebert…” said Sophia, only to trail off, her face going stony.

“They’d find us,” I said. “If we called Armsmaster.”

“Not gonna call him,” said Sophia. “Just leave him a message with your bugs, or something.”

“And get that close to the PRT building?” asked Madison. “We’re _not_ doing that. Your range is what, Taylor? A block? Two? No. Why _couldn’t_ we post it online? PHO—”

“Who said anything about _we?_ Terry’s not going anywhere near,” said Sophia. “He’s getting out. You too, Mads. I’ve got— Look. Posting online won’t work. They’d find us in minutes. Even if they didn’t, they’d just take it down.”

“Even better,” said Madison. “Everyone will know something’s up.”

“Assuming anyone would believe us in the first place,” I said. “Which they won’t. Everyone loves Miss Militia. I have her fucking poster on my wall!”

“So do I,” said Madison, a tiny smile pulling at her lips before disappearing back into a sea of moroseness.

“But there’s evidence, though,” said Terry. He gestured at the shoebox we’d found in Elisa’s safe.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can all be covered up, though.”

“If we could just get it out there,” continued Terry. “We have to help Elisa—”

“Maddy,” said Sophia, cutting her brother off. “Your rowing teacher or chess thing or whatever, the one who knew the reporter—”

I had the feeling Sophia was being deliberately obtuse in an attempt to distract Madison and Terry, and it seemed to be working. Madison rolled her eyes and huffed.

“My _violin_ teacher,” she said. “Kate Matthews is her sister. Reporter for Channel 7.”

“It won’t work,” I said.

“Got a better idea?” asked Sophia. “Wanna go to Armsmaster?”

I shrugged. Sophia grimaced. But I didn’t have any better ideas. Nobody would believe us, no matter what we did. Every plan was just as bad as the last.

Even if Kate believed us, even if she didn’t think us Mastered, even if she wanted to help us… Investigations took time, didn’t they? We needed help _now._ And while we’d found evidence, how much of it was actually conclusive? Would Kate even find more, if she investigated?

Then again… maybe some help, even slow help, would be better than no help at all.

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Maddy— Madison. Where’s your violin teacher?”

Madison’s violin teacher lived in the southern end of downtown, down by the coast. She worked out of a nice little house with graying shingles down its sides. It was surrounded by trees and other greenery, nestled within a neighborhood of similar houses, each with foliage growing up them as if to make them appear one with the manufactured nature surrounding them. The neighborhood itself was wrapped within tall walls of shrubs that did their best to obscure the skyline to the north.

Within the neighborhood’s walls were precious few places where Sophia, Terry, and I could wait. I couldn’t keep myself from nervously looking around as we sat down in a spot by some trees a few blocks away, hopefully secluded enough not to be noticed. My bugs mapped out a handful of escape routes, but they’d not help us if anyone actually spotted us: we wouldn’t be hard to outrun if our pursuers had vehicles. Many of the houses had occupants who could look out at any moment. I tagged everyone within reach as soon as we’d arrived in the neighborhood, but even if one of my bugs noticed someone looking, it would probably be too late for us to do anything about it, and that was assuming nobody had noticed us already: four teenagers wearing hoods and domino masks didn’t exactly blend in.

My fingers dug into the mulch as Madison approached her violin teacher’s house. She glanced up and down the street before knocking on the door. The bugs I’d tagged her with caught each knock as if they’d come from beside my ear.

A few moments passed. Was her teacher even home? It was a Tuesday. What if she had another job? What if—

The door opened. My bugs caught a noise of surprise, and then—

“Sorry, Mrs. Matthews,” said Madison. “It’s me. I just— did you see the news?”

I almost expected Mrs. Matthews to shut the door in Madison’s face. _Presumed Mastered,_ the headline had read, and I had to assume the TV stations had aired something equally damning. As far as Mrs. Matthews knew, Madison was dangerous. But she ushered Madison inside and shut the door behind her.

“Chill, Hebert,” said Sophia. She tapped my hand. I yanked it away, sending a clump of mulch through the air. It missed Terry’s face by a few inches, but he didn’t seem to notice. He kept staring at the ground, his expression inscrutable. I felt myself swallow.

I shook off my hand. Bits of mulched wood had dug in leaving little imprints here and there.

“It’ll work,” said Sophia, but I didn’t think she believed it.

“It’s over, Sophia,” said Terry. “They’re gonna catch us eventually. I don’t think they’ll just let us go back to our lives.”

I tried to tell myself he was being dramatic, but the thought refused to fully take hold.

“It’ll work, Terry,” said Sophia.

“They’re calling Kate,” I said. “At least Madison’s thinking to use speakerphone.”

A car drove by. I couldn’t tell if anyone inside noticed us. Someone down the street brushed by a window and stepped on one of my ants. I tried to find another, but I was also trying to listen in on the other dozen nearby houses, and trying to follow Madison’s conversation, all while I still wasn’t as good at listening as I wanted to be—

“—needs actual evidence, Madison,” my bugs heard a voice say over the speakerphone. It was presumably Kate Matthews, but I didn’t watch enough television to recognize her voice. “With the PRT saying you’ve been Mastered—”

I grunted in frustration. Sophia raised an eyebrow.

“It’s not going to work,” I said. “She’s asking about Madison being Mastered. I mean… what did we expect? Really?”

“But we have evidence,” said Terry. “The shoebox—”

“Trial records are better,” said Sophia. “Can independently verify those.”

“Madison’s trying to explain,” I said. “Kate’s saying it’s ‘not a lot to go on.’”

“Least it’s _something_ ,” said Sophia. “Aren’t reporters supposed to investigate?”

“It’s _nothing,_ Hess,” I said. “It’s…”

My arms tensed. I dropped a hand to the ground.

“Taylor?” she asked.

“Have to go,” I said, shoving my hand against the ground and leaping to my feet. Sophia immediately did the same, pulling Terry up behind her. “Cars. Two, maybe three. Big ones. Vans?”

If they were heading for Mrs. Matthews’s house, maybe Sophia, Terry, and I had a chance. I tried to lead us down one of the escape routes—

“Fuck,” said Sophia.

I didn’t need to look to see why she’d said it. The PRT vans had arrived. They had not gone to Mrs. Matthews’s house: someone must have seen Sophia, Terry, and I. I could only hope they hadn’t seen Madison as well.

“Come on!” I hissed, even as I heard the grating sound of a van door sliding open a hundred feet behind me.

PRT officers began to yell at us, but we ignored them. We squeezed through the cover of branches and leaves, then into a hole a dog must have dug through the tall shrubberies bordering the neighborhood. Behind me, I heard tires squeal—

We broke through to the street, but one of the vans was already rounding the corner, even as I could feel PRT officers approaching behind us. They were nearly to the hole we’d snuck through— 

The van’s door slid open, and out jumped Miss Militia herself, and behind her two more officers.

“You don’t want to be a part of this, Sophia,” she said. “You know where it ends.”

I didn’t look at Sophia, but the gnat I’d tagged her with felt her flinch. I tried to search for a way out, any way out—

“You’re Terry, then?” said Miss Militia, looking to Terry. She was stalling for time, I realized. Why? Did she think we could get away? Behind her I saw some officers setting up a device; was it to hold us? To hold Sophia?

“I’m so sorry,” continued Miss Militia, looking from Terry, and then to Sophia.

The way she’d said it— the way she’d _looked_ at him— Before I knew what I was doing, I’d reached down to my waist. Miss Militia began to raise her arm, but I’d already unclipped the pepper spray. I squeezed the trigger; heard Miss Militia yell, and then—

Thick globs of something shot at me, sticking to my skin. I let the muscles in my arm loosen, but my arm didn’t fall, the quickly-hardening substance supporting its weight.

Out the corner of my eye, before the foam stole my vision, I saw Sophia turn incorporeal. And then everything went dark.

A jolt. A hiss. A strange smell.

And everything faded away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to EtchJetty, Reyemile, and Juff for helping beta.


	7. The Escape

My eyes were closed but still it was too bright. I tried to bring up a hand to shield them, confusing myself for a minute over which muscle was which. I managed to turn my head away from the bright lights in the ceiling as my eyes began to open.

For a long moment I stared at the walls. They were lined with metal sheeting. Not thick. Just a few inches, an ant on the opposite site told me. If the walls were hollow, there weren’t any bugs inside.

The room couldn’t be much more than eight feet to a side. There was a television set into the wall, a toilet in the corner, and the door, with only a little window two thirds up.

The room was one of many, all arranged in a neat row down a hall. Some had thicker walls than mine, but none so thick as those lining the handful of cells a floor below. Guards stood watch in the hall. I recognized the taste of their uniforms: PRT officers.

Was I in the PHQ? No. The traffic outside made that impossible. The PRT headquarters downtown, then? I was a few floors below ground level. I thought I could make out the shape of the lobby above.

There were people in the cells neighboring mine, but I couldn’t tell who they were. Terry? Madison? Sophia? Or had Sophia gotten away? She’d gone incorporeal just before I lost consciousness. She’d been about to leave us behind. Not just me, but her brother, too…

I made my fist relax and attempted to forget about Sophia. I scanned up the building. It was full of people bustling about, many working in little cubicles, others working in offices.

There were so many voices. I tried to make sense of them all. I needed to know—

I tried to calm my breathing. Tried to imagine the walls were yards away instead of feet. That the bright light was the sun shining upon me. That the bed was mine at home. But however much I tried, the walls were still there, my bugs rendering them immovable to my mind; the bright lights failed to bring any touch of warmth to my skin; and thoughts of home—

Would they bring Dad? I wanted them to, didn’t I?

I tried to sink into my swarm. The cacophony washed over me. Wait— A voice. I recognized it. I tried to move closer…

“—really think I’d lie to you, Colin?”

It was Miss Militia. Who was she talking to?

“Everyone lies, Hannah,” came the reply. Armsmaster. “If they have good enough reason.”

“There _is_ a Master,” said Miss Militia.

They were in a small room. Rough carpet floor. Metal desk. Upon the desk were dozens of instruments all tasting of metal. A few pieces of plastic here and there. Something that might have been a phone. Was it Armsmaster’s office?

“And if the effect doesn’t wane?” asked Armsmaster.

“Master effects can be permanent,” said Miss Militia. Was she pleading with him?

“It’s possible,” said Armsmaster. “But unusual.”

“It fits,” said Militia. “With what she did to— I can’t let him go again.”

Was she talking about Elisa? I wondered if she had spoken with her daughter since Harrow’s.

“We can’t hold them forever, Hannah,” said Armsmaster.

“There are Thinkers, even Masters that can help, who can reverse—”

“Piggot wouldn’t like that,” said Armsmaster.

My insides became as stone, heavy and immovable, my breathing stalled and my muscles tense. The thought of someone messing with my head like that, of them overwriting the truth because they thought me delusional… a wave of nausea threatened to take me, but I shoved it back down.

“There’s precedent. If… We’ll figure something out, Colin,” said Miss Militia. “We have to protect—”

“I want to talk with them,” said Armsmaster.

“It’s too dangerous,” said Miss Militia. “If it’s a contagion—”

“That hypothesis has proven unlikely,” said Armsmaster. “If it had been, Lustrum’s teachings would have escaped our efforts to contain it. The risk should be minimal if Gallant assists—”

“You can’t expose him, too,” said Militia. “I think one of them could _be_ the Master, Colin. I _swear_ I recognize the girl from the files. Maybe a daughter.”

There was silence for a minute. Not quite silence: instruments rattled and metal scraped against metal as Armsmaster dragged something large and heavy across his desk.

“Fine,” he said.

“Trust me, Colin,” Miss Militia begged.

Armsmaster grunted. Miss Militia stood in the doorway, but Armsmaster no longer seemed to be paying her any attention. Metal began to clink against itself; a drill began to whir. Finally, she left.

Terry had wondered what Miss Militia’s plan could be. I’d thought that, whatever it was, we’d not stand any chance against it. I’d assumed that the PRT and Protectorate would be behind her all the way.

But now, I had to wonder if she had a plan at all. And if she didn’t… what would have happened had we taken Sophia’s advice and contacted Armsmaster? Would things have turned out better? Would I be in this cell, now?

I stood. As my feet touched the slick, cold cement of the floor, I realized I wasn't wearing my shoes. I wasn’t wearing my clothes at all. Instead, I wore a gown not unlike the one I’d worn in the hospital just a couple months back.

Behind me was a desk. How nice. The cells downstairs didn’t have such luxuries. On the chair was a set of sweats. Some other things, too. Slippers, toothbrush, tampons. I pulled on the sweats and slippers.

I began to pace. One stride, turn, two strides, turn, one stride. My fingers ran along the wall, feeling the metal surface turn to the glass television and back.

Had Sophia been right? My fingers twitched, and I felt a thousand bugs do the same. It was probably too late, now. Armsmaster had agreed not to talk with us. But maybe…

There was only one way I could reach out to him. It wasn’t a choice I could unmake, and it was a choice whose consequences I could not guess, but only hope for. It was a choice every part of me screamed not to make, but…

I stopped my pacing midstep, my fingers bending slightly to grip the edge of the doorframe.

Slowly, haltingly, my bugs began to move. A line of ants crawled up the walls and into the lab in which Armsmaster was still tinkering. Up the desk’s leg—they moved so slowly—and then onto the surface, each leaving a trail of pheromones behind for more ants to follow.

I wound them into a pattern of letters. It didn’t take long. I only had to lead an ant or two: the rest followed the trails on their own. I wasn’t sure if I was shaping all the letters correctly, or if I may have gotten one or two backwards or upside down. I hoped it would be recognizable.

_Not Mastered. Help._

I could feel the letters shifting and moving as the ants walked. Now and then I made little adjustments as they stepped out of line.

All there was left to do was wait and hope. It had been, I supposed, a leap of faith.

A mechanical clock ticked a few stories down in some sort of break room. I counted the seconds. It took ten minutes for Armsmaster to notice the message.

His chair skidded against his office’s carpet floor, falling over with a loud clatter behind him. He edged towards the corner of his desk and the thing that might have been a phone.

Did he reach for it? I couldn’t tell. His torso twisted, only to stop suddenly. A moment; a tiny, pained sigh; a muttered curse. Finally, he continued the twist.

Rattle of handset against housing. Click of a button, then three more.

“Need Gallant,” he said, brusquely. “Observation room, level B3.”

Think. I had to think: not thousands of thoughts, but one at a time. Breathe. Concentrate. If Armsmaster was coming to talk with me—he was, wasn’t he?—I had to know what I was going to say. Where I would start. How to get him to believe not only that I believed my own words, but that those words represented truth.

I pushed away the sound of metal scraping against metal as Armsmaster grabbed whatever he’d placed upon his desk. Attempted to tune out him walking down the halls and over to the elevator. He fiddled with something. His phone?

Several PRT officers began to move in the hall outside. A few approached my cell. One pressed something. A beep, and the television turned red. A few seconds later, the door slid open.

Two officers stood in the doorway, with two more behind them. One held a pair of handcuffs; another a taser. The others held strange guns that I suspected sprayed the same foam that had been used to immobilize me before.

I opened my mouth, but—

“Do not speak,” commanded the taller of the two in front, as if reciting from a script. “Any attempt will be considered a threat, and countermeasures will be used.”

“Turn and face the wall,” ordered the shorter. I lifted a foot— “Slowly!”

I turned as slowly as I could. I could feel each breath leaving my mouth—

“Hands,” said the first.

She secured the cuffs around my wrists. They weren’t tight, but the bands were narrow enough that they dug in uncomfortably regardless. I took a deep breath only to get a jab in the shoulder blades. Right: no surprising moves.

“Walk,” she commanded.

We moved down the hall, around a corner, and into a room too large for the small table that sat within. On either side of the table was a chair.

They sat me in one of the chairs, redoing my cuffs in front of me. I tried not to look at the two-way mirror. On the other side, Armsmaster was talking with someone I assumed was Gallant.

“—may be able to hear us,” Armsmaster said. My cheek twitched.

“She heard that,” said Gallant. I felt something constrict in my chest— “And _definitely_ heard that.”

“Watch for the usual,” said Armsmaster. “Abrupt emotional shifts in either of us, changes in—”

“Got it,” said Gallant.

Armsmaster turned to a PRT officer. “Begin,” he said. The officer nodded and turned to a computer. A mouse click, and then a camera’s red light switched on.

The door opened. Armsmaster stepped in, his footsteps tapping gently against the floor. I took a short breath, then a longer one, grabbed my words, and—

“Going to read me my rights?” I asked. I expected him to tell me not to speak— but then, why bother talking with me at all? “Do I need a lawyer?”

“Your statements cannot be used against you,” he said. “This is informational only. You may speak freely.”

“Miss Militia thinks I’m Mastered,” I said. “Or that I _am_ a Master.”

Armsmaster did not reply. He sat across from me. Placed his hands upon the table. Interlocked his fingers. Waited.

“I’m not a Master,” I said. But then, that wasn’t quite true, was it? “Not one like that. I don’t— I can’t control people.”

I looked at him. I could see my face mirrored in his visor, and again behind him in the two-way mirror. I couldn’t recognize my own expression. Hope? Fear? If the former, he made no move to validate it; if the latter, he did not attempt to soothe it. He remained silent, his expression calm. Serene, even.

“I—”

“You are not required to discuss your powers,” he said, his voice softer than his words. “Nor to confirm whether you are a Parahuman.”

The statement ought to have been a comfort. But it had stolen the planned words from my mouth, leaving me empty. Had he done so on purpose, to put me off-guard?

“I…” I looked to the side. Where had I been planning to begin? Had I managed to come up with a plan? I couldn’t remember. “There isn’t a Master. There never was.”

Armsmaster did not move.

“The kidnapping,” I said. “It was from Harrow’s. I mean, uh… the Harold Stansfield Clinic, I think? The papers called it a hospital, but it wasn’t. It practiced ‘conversion therapy.’ It’s basically tortur—”

“I’m aware of the practice,” said Armsmaster.

“Okay,” I said. “Right. The child was— she was a trans girl. Miss Militia’s daughter. I think Miss Militia sent her to Harrow’s. To ‘fix’ her, I guess. Lustrum didn’t kidnap anyone. She rescued them.”

“Legally—” Armsmaster began.

“Fuck that,” I said, only catching myself after I’d said it. My cheeks warmed. “Sorry. But I’ve read about it. It’s effectively—”

“I said I’m familiar,” said Armsmaster. “The Mastering wasn’t the only allegation against Lustrum.”

“It was the largest,” I said. “And she didn’t drug anyone either. Those drugs… the ones supposedly bio-tinkered? El— Miss Militia’s daughter made them. It’s her power, I think, like Miss Militia’s is to create weapons. The pills even have the same green color. They were hormones, and I bet the thing about castration was—”

Something beeped. Armsmaster shoved himself away from the table and jumped to his feet before rushing out of the room.

“Have I been comp—” he began.

“Director Piggot wants to see you immediately,” said Gallant. “No, she didn’t say why.”

Armsmaster turned, but Gallant stopped him.

“Also, sir,” he continued. “You should know: the Stansfield clinic—”

“She can hear—”

“I don’t care,” said Gallant. “She’s telling the truth about them.”

“Understood,” said Armsmaster.

He rushed off upstairs. Gallant returned down. I was taken back to my cell, the officers no less abrupt than they had been before.

I sat on the bed, trying to follow Armsmaster’s progress up the elevator. He was halfway up when the alarms sounded.

“An alarm has been activated,” a voice echoed through a hundred speakers. “The building is now on lockdown. Please remain calm and follow lockdown procedures. Thank you.”

Armsmaster’s elevator stopped. After a moment it began moving down again, stopping a few floors above ground level.

The PRT officers outside my cell tilted their heads as if listening to something. Earpieces, I realized after a moment. I couldn’t know what was said, but I could guess. Two began to jog for the elevator, and two more for the stairs, leaving only two in the hall. They must need reinforcements. But where? Upstairs? Down? And why?

Something stepped on a bug outside. One of the PRT officers fell to the floor, then the other. Someone searched through their pockets, and then—

The beep. A few seconds, and the door to my cell slid open.

“Come on, Hebert.”

“ _Sophia?_ ”

“Not leaving Terry here,” she said.

Seriously? Not that I could blame her for wanting to rescue her brother. Had she known they’d consider bringing in a Master to ‘fix’ us? The nausea from earlier resurfaced as I wondered what all such a Master might try to ‘fix.’

But Sophia couldn’t actually hope to escape, could she? And then there was Armsmaster. What would this plan do for our chances with him?

“Not escaping,” she said. “You are. And Terry and Elisa.”

“But Armsmaster—”

“Not risking Terry,” she said.

“Madison—”

“Got away. For now, at least. If she’s very lucky, things’ll work themselves out before she’s caught. She told Kate everything, and I— it’s not important.”

Sophia grabbed my arm. I suppressed my instinct to yank it away. She pulled me out the room and down the hall. We passed the two officers; each had the tip of a dart embedded in their shoulder. My eyes dropped to Sophia’s other hand, in which she held a crossbow already loaded with another dart.

She let me go, exchanging my arm for a phone she’d clipped to a belt loop. She tapped it against a reader. It beeped, and its light glowed green. Sophia continued down the hall, already moving to the cell two doors down.

“Could use some support, Hebert,” she said. “Use your spiders or something. Keep watch.”

The cell door still hadn’t— oh. There it went. I peered inside. Elisa peered back, wide-eyed. I shrugged.

“Come on, I guess?” I said.

I don’t know why I’d expected Elisa to object. Perhaps I’d thought she would on principle, as the only adult in the room. Perhaps I had wished she would. Instead, she followed me out the door to where Sophia was already waiting with Terry.

“We have about five minutes,” she said. “You should be able to get out through the tunnel on B1. Sensors have been cut. Take this.”

She hefted a bag from the floor and shoved it at me. Why me? Why not her brother?

“Money. Phones,” said Sophia. She turned and gestured for us to follow her down the hall and over to the stairs, passing two disabled security gates along the way. How had she disabled them? “Some clothes, too. They won’t fit you. Contact Faultline first. Half the cash’s for her. If things go to shit she’ll set you up semi-legally. Legally as she can set up escapees, anyway.”

“But—”

“Know what they do to Master victims? Ones like they think you are?” Sophia asked her brother, stopping to look him in the eyes. He shook his head. “Good.”

I looked down at the bag in my arms. This plan hadn’t been for us, had it? It wasn’t the sort of plan one concocted over the course of an hour or two. She’d been planning this for awhile. For _her_. She’d had help, too. She’d have had to, to sneak us out of a locked down building like this.

Elisa glanced at one of the guards, her eyes lingering on the dart in his shoulder. She flexed her hand, and a syringe filled with eerie green liquid formed in her grasp, held as if ready to stab. I wished I still had my—

“Can you make pepper spray?” I asked. Apparently she could. Would the spray be green?

Somewhere above us, Armsmaster had left his elevator and begun searching the third floor room by room. He seemed to be heading for a locked room at the end of a hallway, in which my bugs tasted guns. An armory? Had Sophia triggered an alarm there, somehow? I checked for the bug I’d placed on Miss Militia, but it must have died.

“And you?” I asked Sophia.

She shrugged, then stopped. Gestured at the stairwell door. Level B1.

“Told you,” she said. “I’m not escaping. Turning myself in. Loudly. Get things sorted out if I’m lucky. If not… should give you some time. Tunnel’s through the parking, over to the left. Comes out in a garage a block away.”

I clenched my fist. Looked at the door.

This was a terrible idea, but before I could change my mind I made the decision: I shoved the bag at Terry and turned to Sophia.

“I’m going with you.”

“No.”

“Don’t have time to argue,” I said. “Two capes can keep them busy better than one.”

“I’ll stay, too,” said Elisa. “She wants me.”

She gave Terry a half-smile: sad; apologetic. He began to say something, but—

“She’s my mom,” said Elisa, shaking her head. “And you…”

She trailed off, but I understood what she meant. What would be the point of us all staying? We might as well all try to run together, even if we wouldn’t get far.

Terry nodded slowly, his cheeks pulled back as if in pain. I thought I could see tears begin to pool beneath his eyes.

“Thank you,” he told her, quietly. “For… everything, really.”

I felt as if I was missing something. I probably was. Maybe it was the sort of thing I was meant to miss.

He opened the door. Glanced at me, then Sophia.

“I…” he tried. “Sophia…”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

One last look. Then he was gone.

Armsmaster, still on the third floor, suddenly stopped his search. He stood still for a moment as if checking on something, and then— “Check B3.”

“They’re coming,” I said.

“Won’t be happy with me,” said Sophia. “Did like you said. Uploaded everything. Did it from my _Shadow Stalker_ account. Maddy said she’d try to spread it.”

Was that why Director Piggot had wanted to see Armsmaster? I wasn’t sure how to respond, so instead I checked on the PRT officers moving about the building. The doors to our stairwell were locked, but the officers were breaking through with loud bangs that I didn’t need my bugs to hear.

“Come on,” said Sophia. “Don’t want them finding us here.”

She charged up the stairs, Elisa and I following behind. We arrived at the door to the lobby. Sophia tapped a button on her phone. The lock disengaged, and we exited the stairwell.

The lobby was eerily empty. How had Sophia been planning to—

“I’m here!” she shouted. “So’s Elisa!”

I don’t know what I had been expecting Sophia to do, but whatever it was, that had not been it.

My head turned at a shout. It had been a name, the same name I’d seen written on the envelope last night. And the voice—

Miss Militia.

PRT officers swarmed in from doors all around us. My bugs counted dozens. They raised their weapons. Most had the same funny guns as before. A few more had tasers.

But only half the agents were aiming at Sophia, Elisa, and I. My eyes followed the barrels of their guns over to Miss Militia, and only then did I realize that she herself was armed with a gun. Only, hers was not foam-spraying. Instead, it was a plain handgun, just like the one she’d shown Madison last week. And it was pointed at my head.

I tried to lift my eyes from the barrel once. Twice. Finally, they reached Miss Militia’s own. She kept glancing to Elisa; she looked like she wanted to approach her daughter, but she did not move.

“Stand down, Militia.” Armsmaster had arrived. He stepped through the crowd of officers, his face strong and stoic as ever, his Halberd at ease by his side. “Stand down immediately.”

Her hand began to lower at his order, the aim of her gun sinking across my chest and down to the ground. I began to relax. Then she raised the gun again. Armsmaster didn’t notice. His eyes were not on her; instead, they rested upon Sophia. He fiddled with something on his Halberd—

“They’ve Mastered him, Armsmaster,” said Miss Militia, her voice quiet. “I’ll do anything for him.”

Armsmaster’s interest in Sophia disappeared in an instant, his focus suddenly for Miss Militia alone. His stoic expression had vanished, replaced by one of utter shock.

“Stand down immediately, Militia,” he repeated. His hand gripped his Halberd more tightly; my bugs could hear his gloves scrape against its rough, textured grip. “Stand down or I will be forced to engage.”

She did not lower her gun. I wanted to move. Wanted to reach for my pepper spray, wanted to have my bugs swarm her, wanted to— but I couldn’t, not with her finger ready to—

“She’s the Master, Armsmaster,” said Miss Militia. “She has to be. I checked the files. She’s the daughter of one of the suspects—”

“You have three seconds, Militia,” said Armsmaster, raising the Halberd. “Three—”

“Everybody stop!”

Everybody did.

A woman walked through the crowd of PRT officers. _Director Piggot_. Her steely gaze glanced across me and over to Elisa and Sophia, then to Armsmaster. Finally, they rested themselves on Miss Militia.

“Back off,” she told the officers behind her. “Give us space. You too, Armsmaster.”

The Director regarded Miss Militia. Her eyes lingered on the handgun for a long moment, before briefly darting off to the side as if trying to solve a puzzle. Finally, she brought them back to Miss Militia herself.

“This is a mess, isn’t it?” she said, calm and steady, as if over spilled afternoon tea. “Would you please lower your weapon, Miss Militia?”

Miss Militia’s hands were shaking. My eyes followed the tip of the gun as it wobbled side to side.

“I checked the Lustrum files,” said Militia. “Her—”

“Mom, please.” Elisa stepped forward slowly. A few PRT officers began to raise their weapons, but the Director waved them back down. “There was never a Master.”

“But Lustrum… she ruined you,” said Militia. “She gave you those pills—”

“Lustrum saved me from where _you_ sent me,” said Elisa. “But she never gave me any medicine. I’d never even met her until she broke me out.”

Miss Militia laughed a bitter laugh.

“I found one of those pills. Floor of your room, beneath the nightstand,” said Miss Militia. “Can’t you see the lies they put in your head?”

Elisa closed her eyes for a moment. Took a breath. Held out her hand. In it sat the syringe she’d created earlier, filled with its viridian liquid. The PRT officers stiffened, and Miss Militia’s eyes narrowed.

A moment later, the syringe vanished in a swirl of green and black energy that seemed almost alive, before coalescing into a small scored pill, still green, then to a pill just like Terry’s, and finally back to the syringe.

“I was the same age as you, Mom,” said Elisa. “When I triggered. Going through the wrong puberty… it can be traumatic, you know?”

Beside me, I heard Sophia breathe in sharply as Miss Militia took a quick step back.

The PRT Director raised a calming hand. She looked to Elisa, her head tilting slightly, strands of her bobbed hair dipping across her face. Was she trying to decide whether to allow the conversation to continue? She whispered something to an officer behind her, who whispered something back, shaking his head. She grimaced.

“Please,” said Militia. She called Elisa by that name again. “Please come home. I love you. I’ve always wanted what’s best for you. I just want you to be happy. Not— not like _this_ …”

“I left for a reason, Mom,” said Elisa.

She left? I’d assumed Miss Militia hadn’t seen her daughter since Harrow’s, but that hadn’t been ‘leaving,’ exactly. More of a rescue. If she _left…_ She’d have to have been an adult, first, which would mean—

“She was trying to help, wasn’t she?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from the gun and over to Elisa. “My mom, when she crashed… She was trying to help you get away. The air mattress wasn’t for Emma, was it?”

Elisa tilted her head in my direction. The pained look upon her face was answer enough.

Everything seemed to shrink. The cacophony from my bugs died away; the crowd of PRT officers seemed to fade to nothingness. There was only Miss Militia standing in front of me. Her gun was no longer relevant. Now, all that mattered was—

“Did you kill her?” I demanded. “Did you kill my mother?”

Militia drew back as if struck. I was vaguely aware of the Director jolting forward, only stopping herself at the last moment. Frustration crossed her face as she again hissed something to one of the officers behind her.

“No, I—” said Miss Militia. “I’m not a— I never— I didn’t. How could you think I’d—”

Her breathing was quick and unsteady. Her eyes moved erratically in tiny, quick movements. She looked as if the world were collapsing around her. Did I believe her? I didn’t know. I needed to know, didn’t I? I needed—

“You’re the one holding a gun,” said Sophia, gesturing to Miss Militia’s shaking hand. Militia’s eyes followed her motion, and so too did mine. I tried to focus on it; tried to remember what mattered—

“You don’t want to kill anyone,” said Director Piggot, her words calm and reassuring. “Do you, Miss Militia?”

Militia shook her head slowly.

“Why don’t you lower your weapon,” continued the Director.

And then it was over.

In a swirl of vibrating green and black, the gun changed to a knife. PRT officers swarmed Miss Militia, coating her hands-first in layer upon layer of sticky foam.

I let out a breath. My legs began to give way, and I let Sophia catch me.

Director Piggot let out a relieved sigh. A group of PRT officers approached with something—a forcefield generator?—but she waved them off.

“Not needed, now,” she said. She gestured to Sophia, Elisa, and I. “Get them to Upside.”

What was Upside? It couldn’t be bad, I realized, as Sophia let out a shaking breath.

Upside, it turned out, was a conference room on the top floor. It was not as impressive as the one at PHQ, but its seats were more comfortable.

Sophia and I each collapsed into a chair. I tried to say something, but I didn’t know the words.

“I needed a hero, Taylor. When she caught us—” Sophia’s voice was the softest I’d heard it. “And even just now, downstairs— I—”

She made a funny sort of laugh, tiny and relieved, and gave me a soft little smile.

“I got you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to EtchJetty, Reyemile, and Juff for helping beta.


	8. The Close

“That could have gone worse,” said Director Piggot, taking a seat at one end of _Upside’s_ long table, two PRT officers taking seats to either side. She pulled a lever beneath her chair and it sank down an inch or two. She stood slightly, pulled it again, and it rose half an inch back. Satisfied, her steely eyes moved from Elisa to Sophia to me, and then down to a watch on her wrist.

“They should be—” she began, but cut off as the door opened.

The first to enter was a man I did not recognize: he had a mustache and a quirky grin, and wore a button-up shirt. Behind him was Laura Mirthton, a bounce in her step, and behind her—

“Dad!”

“Taylor!”

Dad wrapped his arms around me before I could fully stand, nearly toppling us both over. Then he pushed me away from him and scanned me up and down for injuries.

“I’m alright,” I said.

“She almost wasn’t,” said Director Piggot, still seated at the end of the table. She looked to the doorway, in which stood a man wearing a suit. “Have we gotten everyone? Miss Mirthton, Dr. Thenison… Where’s Ms. Hess?”

“Asked to have Sophia’s representative here, instead,” said the man in the doorway. Sophia’s head made a small jerky movement, but her expression remained neutral.

“I see,” said Director Piggot, as if she’d tasted something sour. “And where is she?”

“Just arrived, m’am. Should be up in a minute.”

The Director grunted. She held out a hand, and the officer to her right handed her a folder. She slapped it down upon the table and flipped it open. Her fingers flicked through the pages, but apart from a raised eyebrow her expression remained neutral as she scanned them.

My bugs felt someone approaching with hurried footsteps. The door opened and a woman rushed in and haphazardly took a seat at the table. The Director barely spared her a glance, and no introduction was given but for a small roll of Sophia’s eyes.

Director Piggot closed the folder with a quiet snap, and sighed.

“Let’s begin.”

* * *

“The fate of the Birdcage is uncertain,” I said to the class, letting my eyes flow from one student to the next, but skipping over Emma. “Official word is still that individuals cannot be removed from the prison, though the PRT claims Dragon, the Tinker superhero who runs much of the center’s operations, is ‘looking into’ the problem. _The Paraporter_ has continued to call for closing the prison altogether, and has now been joined by multiple civil rights agencies.”

“We now know that the supposed crime that sent Lustrum to the Birdcage never happened,” said Madison, reading from a sheet of paper, her words not quite flowing naturally. “She did not Master a hero’s child, and she did not order their Mastering. Even if she was guilty of all her other supposed crimes—”

She cut off and looked up from her paper.

“Which, by the way, isn’t looking likely. No castration victims have stepped forward, so that one looks like a rumor. Anyway, even were she guilty of it all, she wouldn’t have received what is effectively a life sentence—see citation nu… oh, I wasn’t supposed to read that aloud. Sorry. But there was a case, basically, involving an environmental activist—”

“Madison,” I warned, checking my watch. We had less than five minutes left, and couldn’t get distracted discussing the intricacies of the Three Strikes act and the case of the People v. Lobtree, as fascinating as Madison might have found it.

“Right,” said Madison. “The publication of our findings by the hero Shadow Stalker led to a public uproar around Lustrum’s trial and sentencing, and the use of the Birdcage in general. But it has also had an impact on current trials, including that of Paige Mcabee, also known as the singer Bad Canary. Like Lustrum, she was not allowed to speak in her defense, and her appointed lawyer did little to fight the charges against her. There is now a possibility that the mishandling of her case may lead to a mistrial.”

“Miss Militia is currently awaiting trial,” said Sophia. She snorted. “Probably will be fairer than the one she got Lustrum. Her daughter, Elisa Melbury, has elected not to hide her identity, and continues to assist at the BBQ, Brockton Bay’s LGBT center, supplying medicine to those who need it.”

* * *

“Stick around for a few minutes, Taylor?” said Mr. Gladly after the bell rang. I could only just make out his words over the footsteps of my classmates and the sounds of chair legs scraping against the floor.

I nodded. There wasn’t anything for me to do but wait: it had been a presentation day, so there were no books to put away.

“Well done,” said Mr. Gladly, half standing with one knee on his stool as he scooted his way towards my desk. “You, Sophia, and Madison got along nicely, didn’t you?”

“We shouldn’t have,” I said.

“I’m sometimes amazed at what 30% of your class grade can do,” said Mr. Gladly.

Did he expect me to thank him?

“If you need anything—” he started.

“I’m fine.”

I left the classroom. Leaned against the wall. Closed my eyes.

Now what? For the past month, everything had revolved around the project. It still felt like there must be some lead to follow; some fact yet to be discovered. But we’d followed the leads, we’d found the facts, and we’d presented them to the world.

“She actually _misses_ them.”

My eyes opened slowly. I didn’t want to deal with Emma just now. But she and her friends had gathered themselves around me; their presence was suffocating.

I reached down for my bag—

Missing.

Alertness slammed into me, and I stood upright with a sudden jolt. I scanned the crowd, searching for my backpack. Emma, Katherine, Marie, Julia, but none of them had it.

Then I saw it. Blue canvas only a couple months old and already bearing dozens of stains and battle scars. It held textbooks and assignments, and yet hung from Sophia’s hand as if it weighed no more than a pound.

Sophia was standing the closest to me of any of them, Madison beside her. Should I have expected this? I’d thought— I didn’t know what I’d thought. Sophia had said I was a hero, but now, reunited with her friends, she… It wasn’t a betrayal, not like Emma had been. Sophia was never my friend. I wasn’t going to cry, or— Or—

“She’s _crying_!” crowed Emma. “She must have _really_ liked you Sophia! Oh Taylor, I didn’t realize you were _gay_! Oh… oh my. Is _that_ why you kept inviting me over?”

She took a dramatic step back from me, her hand moving to her mouth as her face twisted into a mask of disgust that didn’t quite cover her delight.

“She was probably checking me out! I feel so—”

“Why would she?” asked Sophia. She was trying very hard to look nonchalant, but there was something underneath, an apprehension; she was building herself up to do something or say something— “I never did.”

I didn’t catch Emma’s reaction. Sophia’s words had drawn my focus, and for the moment, there was only her. I didn’t understand. Had she just come out, just like that? Was she—

“C’mon,” said Sophia. Who was she talking to? She nudged me. “Taylor. C’mon. Look, Emma… we’ll hang later, okay?”

Emma didn’t answer Sophia. She stared, mouth open, eyes blinking. She tried to say something, but words seemed to fail her.

“I told you,” Sophia added with a not-quite-apologetic shrug, slinging one of my backpack’s straps over her shoulder.

She poked me in the arm. Gestured. Silently, I followed her down the hall and into an unused classroom, Madison trailing behind us.

What was I supposed to say?

“Thought you could use a hand,” said Sophia, perching on a small desk. “‘sides, wouldn’t want you to maim anybody.”

“I’m _not_ going to maim anyone,” I said, my eyes following the desk beneath Sophia as it threatened to tilt forwards beneath her.

“It was a joke, Taylor,” said Sophia, leaning back, letting desk legs touch the ground again.

“And the locker?” I asked. “Was that a joke, too?”

For a moment, Sophia said nothing. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to answer. Madison shifted, and one of her heels squeaked against the laminate floor.

“Not a good one,” said Sophia. “I’m…”

She glanced at Madison. Madison nodded at her as if trying to nudge her along.

“I’m sorry,” said Sophia.

“Why?” I asked. She didn’t seem to understand what I was asking. “Because I’m not a ‘weakling,’ anymore?”

“No, I—” started Sophia, frustration lacing her voice. She looked to Madison for help, but Madison offered none. “It was… You triggered, right? It’s— Not the point. Look, it was shitty. Shouldn’t have done it.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Madison, apparently satisfied with Sophia’s words. “Really, Taylor.”

“And Emma?”

“Emma’s just mad because her team came in second-best on their own hero,” said Madison.

“Not what I meant.”

“Bet I could get her to apologize,” said Sophia.

“I don’t want an apology,” I said. “Not from her.”

“Why’d you ask, then?”

“Why are you still planning to ‘hang’ with her?” I challenged.

Madison held up her hands as if to say ‘don’t look at me.’ Had Madison stopped hanging out with Emma?

Sophia shrugged. “Feel responsible, I guess.”

“Responsible?”

“Put ideas into her head,” said Sophia. “Shitty ones, I guess.”

She had, hadn’t she? She’d shown up, and then Emma had— But it couldn’t be undone, now, could it? It couldn’t. It—

“You care about her,” I said.

“Suppose.”

“Do you care about me?” I asked.

Sophia didn’t meet my eyes. She fiddled with the hem of her t-shirt, scrunching it up within her fist—

“She does,” said Madison, quietly. “So do I.”

“Come clean,” I said. “If you care about me. Hell, if you care about her. It’s clear she needs help.”

Sophia let go of her shirt. The fabric stretched back, little wrinkly echoes left behind.

“They’ll send me to juvie,” she said. “I’m on probation, already. It’s luck they didn’t send me away for publishing everything, or for breaking you out.”

Her eyes finally met mine.

“I don’t want to go to juvie,” she said. “But—”

“I don’t want you to go to juvie, either.”

* * *

Emma wanted to say something, but her parents wouldn’t let her. I wished they’d make her stop looking at me. What was she thinking? I probably didn’t want to know.

“Nice weather,” said Madison. The bugs stuck in the spring downpour outside did not agree. Terry tapped his foot nervously. Dad’s pen scratched across his notebook—he’d normally be at work, but had accompanied me.

“I’m surprised you showed, Emma,” I said, unable to prevent myself from speaking. “I thought you’d turn on her, too.”

Finally, Emma looked away. Madison sighed. Dad’s hand gripped my shoulder more tightly.

“Look, Taylor, I—” Emma started, but she stopped as her father held up a hand. She was probably trying to apologize. Sophia’d said she wanted to. I didn’t want to hear it.

“They’re almost done, I think,” I said.

We were back in the PRT building. Last time, we’d been in _Upside._ Today, Sophia’s hearing was in _Downside,_ a conference room one floor down. I’d been asked to withdraw my bugs, and I had. But while I could not hear what words were being spoken, I _could_ hear their cadence.

I didn’t want to be here, sitting across from Emma in the narrow hallway. But Sophia was here because of me. I hadn’t thought she’d come clean. But she and Madison had.

The door opened. People began to stream out. Armsmaster, Dauntless, Director Piggot.

Armsmaster shot me a look. I rolled my eyes. Sophia had a better chance than he did of convincing me to join the Wards. She’d told me to stay away.

Sophia’s mother exited and walked down the hall, not looking back or waiting for her daughter. Did that mean—

I almost sent my bugs in, but Sophia finally stepped through the door, accompanied by a few PRT officers. One of them was holding the set of electrified cuffs Sophia had worn on her way in. It was a good sign, wasn’t it, if she wasn’t wearing them?

The PRT officers walked off down the hall, leaving Sophia behind with us.

“Sophia!” exclaimed Emma. She stood, but Mrs. Barnes pulled her back to her seat.

Nobody stopped Madison, Terry, and I.

“Hey,” said Sophia, quietly.

“So did they let you free?” asked Madison. “I told you they’d have to. It’d look like they were punishing you for exposing their secrets.”

“Still have to be a Ward,” said Sophia. She looked from me to Emma and back again.

“The _best_ Ward,” said Madison.

“Don’t let Vista hear you say that,” said Sophia. “Gallant or bust for her.”

“Gallant’s not bad, either,” I said. Again, Sophia glanced at Emma. I’d forgotten she was there, and that, as far as she was concerned, I shouldn’t know anything about Gallant.

Terry hugged Sophia, and after a moment, Sophia hugged back.

“Give me a minute?” asked Sophia. I nodded.

She went and talked with Emma. I didn’t listen in. It wouldn’t have been right. Maybe I didn’t want to.

Mrs. Clements had forbidden Madison from speaking to Emma, but Madison had apparently already quietly cut her ties nearly a month before. I wasn’t sure I understood why.

Emma’s parents hadn’t prohibited her from seeing Sophia, although I’d gathered from Sophia’s mutterings that it had been a close thing. Sophia was trying to juggle her friendships. It was… Well, I could handle it, I supposed, if I needed to.

Sophia gave Emma a quick hug, then joined Terry, Madison, and I. Emma’s parents began to pull her down the hall.

“Congratulations, Sophia,” said Dad, a bit stiffly. Still, he gave her a smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Hebert,” said Sophia.

“Congratulations,” I said, a bit belatedly. “Uh… does it… how does it feel?”

It sounded like something you were supposed to say.

Sophia shrugged.

“Dunno. Weird, I guess,” she said. “Used to have secrets. I...”

She looked at me. What did she want? I’d gotten better at reading her, but I found myself unsure. She stood awkwardly, her shoulders angled as if mid-stride…

She looked away.

“I told you they wouldn’t send you away,” I said.

“They would’ve,” she said. “If you hadn’t…”

I’d asked them not to. I’d told her I would. Don’t know if she’d believed me.

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked at the ground. Dad nudged me. Sophia started to say something to Terry, but—

I reached out and hugged her. Brief. Uncomfortable. But a hug. And just as quickly as I had, I released her.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No, I—” she said. “Thanks, Taylor.”

We stood there, neither looking from the other, unsure what to say next.

“Mom went home,” said Terry. “We can catch a bus, or—”

“Need a ride?” asked Dad.

“Should we go to the BBQ?” asked Madison.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds nice.”

Sophia shrugged, but smiled.

“I’d like to check it out,” said Dad. “Taylor’s been talking about going to the DIY classes. Let’s Go Make This.”

“ _Build_ This,” I said.

The repairs had mostly been completed. Surprisingly, the Stansfield family had donated several million dollars to the center.

“’s what I said,” said Dad. “Can say hi to Laura while we’re there. It’s Tuesday, right?”

Laura had begun volunteering on the days she wasn’t teaching.

“You _have_ to introduce me to Dauntless,” said Madison, as we started down the hall. “Clockblocker, too!”

“They’re _not_ related,” said Sophia.

“Are you _sure?_ ” asked Madison.

“Yes, Maddy,” said Sophia, with a sigh. “I’m sure.”

“I’m not ‘Maddy,’” said Madison. “And how do you know? Did they tell you? Because they could be lying. Heroes lie sometimes, haven’t you heard?”

“I just know,” said Sophia.

I rolled my eyes. But I couldn’t help but laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's been a journey. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed.
> 
> Thanks to Juff, Reyemile, and Wörm Höle for beta help!


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